Brenda Cooper's Blog, page 17

Guest Post: Science Fiction and the Future

SF Signal very kindly posted a guest blog of mine.  In it, I discuss three books where the authors did a great job putting real and well-researched ideas into their work.  Two of the authors are actual futurists, and the other book is by two local Analog writers.  But I won’t let out the spoilers here….go on by SF Signal and take a look at what I said.

There will be more guest blogs in the next two month…I’ll list them all here.  It’s kind of fun since there are some wildly different topics.

The Creative Fire is out! Happy Release Day!

The Creative Fire is now shipping from Amazon.  I still haven’t seen it, but I already have the email that says it’s on its way.  Books take a long time to birth, but the happiness factor of knowing they are out in the world really sticks with you anyway.  Even though I’m done with a book long before a publisher is done with the book, it never feels finished until it enters the world as a product someone can buy.

This book is truly beautiful because of the John Picacio cover. Pyr creates works of art with their books, so if you like well-designed books where you turn physical pages, think about getting the trade paperback.   Besides, at least as of this moment, the Kindle version is still on pre-order.

I’d love reports from anyone who sees it in the wild.  I used to go hunting every new release in the local stores, but this week I have a dog recovering from major surgery and a ton of work, so I probably cannot hunt it down myself.  I particularly like to hear about sighting in indie bookstores.

Happy birthday to The Creative Fire.

 

 

Reading Recommendation: Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

Fair warning: Gone Girl is NOT a genre book.  But it’s worth reading, especially for my writer friends.   I picked it up for stress relief – to get away from the books I usually read.  It did succeed on that level.  But more, it’s one of the best unreliable narrator pieces of work I’ve seen at this length in a long time.  An unreliable narrator is easy in short fiction, or at least “sort of” easy.  It’s a technique that allows no mistakes.  I’ve found it very hard to sustain well, even for long stories,  And here Gillian Flynn has pulled it off for a whole book. Gone Girl is a really, really good example of a novel length unreliable narrator.

It’s also good for hooks and tension and twists.  This is a book where I actually disliked both main characters almost immediately, and certainly by the end of the book. But I kept reading.

I found this book to be a nice escape, delightfully well-written, and a good book to learn technique from.  It was also very different from almost anything else I’ve read.  That’s a good thing!

Filk Recommendation: John Anealio’s Laser Zombie Robot Love

Some things belong to deep geekdom. Filk music is one of those things.  John Anealio’s album includes songs about (among other things):

An angry robot who discovers the singularity
Dressing up like a storm-trooper on Halloween
The challenges of being a geek dad
Nanowrimo (and if I have to tell you what that is, you my not grok the song)
and – perhaps only hysterically funny if you are inside the science fiction and fantasy field — a song titled  ”George R.R. Martin is not your bitch.”

At any rate, one of my goals this weekend was to listen to this (which required updated operating systems, but that’s only because I started out on the wrong computer – I won’t go into the geek details here).  I liked it enough I listened to it a few times today, and I will be dropping some of the songs onto my “favorite filk” playlist.  It’s only a $5.00 donation, and I’m pretty sure it will make you smile.  It made me smile.  Go get it.

Sometimes it’s not the wordcount

Most mornings, I sit down at 5:00 and write until 6:00 or 7:00, getting out about 1,000 words.

The last few weeks have been frustrating.  I’ve been driving toward the finish of a book that just doesn’t want to end. Scenes keep getting added.  Some will come back out; this is not going to finish as a 170,000 word book. It’s a sign that I’ve been thrashing.

The proper last bits (and structure for them, which will get laid back into the other text and inform what goes out and what stays) have been licking around the edges of my conscious mind, irritating me since they haven’t quite been willing to expose themselves.  So this morning, I decided to journal instead of writing.  Lo and behold …not only did I finally tease the edges of the end of this book out into the open, but I figured out a key answer to a question I’ve been mulling for the fourth book in the Silver Ship series.

File this under letting your better half work.  The muse is seldom in my conscious mind.  Had I sat down and demanded word count I would have gotten crap that needed to be cut later.

10 days left in Goodreads giveaway for ARC of The Creative Fire

Goodreads Book Giveaway


The Creative Fire
by Brenda Cooper

Giveaway ends October 01, 2012.

See the giveaway details

at Goodreads.

Enter to win

 

On Female Futurists

Last month, my name showed up on the cover of The Futurist magazine.  I didn’t think much about it at the time. They asked me for a brief essay, the request was interesting, and so I wrote about an issue that has been bothering me for a while:  that we are no longer inching toward being stewards and gardeners of the ecosystem, but rather we’re forcing that role on ourselves.   Glen Hiemstra  – my futurist mentor – complimented me on having my name listed (with a number of others) on the cover.  I still didn’t think much about it.  It’s not like it’s my first cover appearance.

But maybe it is even more important than my science fiction stories.

Women are under-represented in science fiction and as futurists.

We are being published in SF, but there are still way more men, particularly on the bestseller lists.  But women do have strong anchor models in the science fiction world.  Margaret Atwood.  CJ Cherryh.  Nancy Kress. We have our up and coming writers like E. Lily Yu, who just won the Campbell recognizing the best new writer in the field.

In the futurist world, there aren’t many anchor role models.  The most successful futurists that come to mind are almost all male.  Alvin Toffler. Jules Verne.  Ray Kurzweil.  Michio Kaku.  Rachel Carson, the author of the 1960’s game-changing book Silent Spring, may be the most influential female futurist.  There is one woman on Jack Uldritch’s list of top ten global futurists. My informal search on YouTube and internet browsers turned up a few more.  Melissa Sterry. Anne Lise Kjaer.

I’m not suggesting that I will become a top female futurist.  I don’t do this full time, at least not right now.  But adding my name to respected women in this field may be even more important than being respected in science fiction.  I truly believe that discussing our future, exploring the possibilities, and then trying to create the best ones is critical.  It is also terribly important that these discussions include women.

I’m looking forward to the day when half of the names of the cover of The Futurist are women (There were about forty contributors to 22nd Century at First Light, the excellent group article my essay appeared in; five were women).

Reading Recommendation: Nexus by Ramez Naam

It’s not often that I recommend a book you can’t get yet.  But I really think you want to pre-order Nexus by Ramez Naam.  I have read it, and I got to blurb it.

I also have a story about it.  I had met Ramez at a series of futurist lunches hosted by futurist mentor, Glen Hiemstra, from Futurist.com. I liked Ramez well enough; he was as interesting as the rest of the crowd, all of whom were in fact interesting.  Fast forward a few months.  Ramez reaches out to me and wants to talk about marketing a fiction book.  I agree to meet with him and chat about this. To put this in context, once you are a published writer, half of the people you know reveal that they, too, yearn to become published writers.  Your best friends suddenly and nervously chatter about the novel in their hearts, the one that they have been trying to write for twenty years.  Strangers at work confess they are in a writing group while you’re waiting for a budget meeting to start.  Still, I remember that Ramez is smart and decide he will be a good dinner companion and he has tech cred (look him up if you are curious.  But use Bing to do it).

So we meet.  He asks about marketing.  I tell him what I know (at least part of which that there is no clear path to publication right now – there a lot of walls to throw spaghetti at).  He has his manuscript with him.  It’s an 8.5 * 11 piled of double-sided paper that’s perfect-bound the way you would bind a tech proposal.  I agree to look at it, a bit reluctantly, but he’s been nice and I’ll see him again at Futurist lunches.  This is all in the middle of a convention if I remember right – maybe Norwescon. I return to my hotel room and open up Nexus and read a few pages and jot a few notes on style and some ideas for what to study next.

The next thing I knew, I was done with the book.

Nexus is a brilliant SF thriller written by a man who understands the tech world, who has researched neuroscience, and who can actually tell a damned good story with thriller pacing. The book actually reminded me of Michael Chricton at his best – maybe in the Andromeda Strain days.  And this is a first novel.

You should really go pre-order it now.

 

Worldcon Schedule

Friday August 31st:

Broad Universe Rapid-Fire Reading.  I’ll join a number of great female writers for very short readings.  I will read from Mayan December (this is, after all, 2012!) and I will give away a few copies. These are always a lot of fun – drop by and hear great snippets from interesting readers.  Laugh a lot.  This will be in Grand Suite 3.

5:00 PM to 5:30, I’ll be the “Writer under glass” where I get to work on a collaborative story, and have people watch me while I do it! I’ve never done such a thing, and I have no idea if I’ll like it.  But the resulting manuscript will go into the charity auction….I hear this is on the Fan Lounge.

Saturday, September 1st

12:00 – 1:30:  The Art of Worldbuilding – Crystal C  Physical geography, economics and politics, religions, conflicts.

2:30 – 3:00 Reading.  I’ll read from my next novel, “The Creative Fire,” which will be out from Pyr in November, 2012.  This is in the Gold Coast room.

4:30 – 6:00 Creating formidable women protagonists.  Buckingham.

Sunday, September 2nd

9:00 – 10:30  World Building Workshop 3:  The Eco System (builds on two other workshops).  Buckingham.

12:00 – 1:30  Kaffeklatsche!  Come by and visit.  Help me fill my table.  Kaffeeklatsche 1.  I will give away at least one book, maybe more.

3:00 – 4:30  Autograph session

 

Wanting to Read

I was hemming and hawing about taking David Brin’s Existence with me (it’s pretty big for airplane reading, and I am going to WORLDCON where I will acquire books whether I want to or not). But then I read the first page and the damned thing is going with me (partly because it’s David, partly because I like the first page, and partly because I want to read something I want to read instead of something I have to read, or I promised X I would read, or whatever.  The last book I read just for fun was Paolo’s.

This is a writerly trap.  It’s important to read what we want to read, and yet I often get bogged down reading manuscripts for workshops or convention writing critique sessions or friend’s books when they want a blurb.

I will free myself for this plan ride!