Max Gladstone's Blog, page 16

Going Home, Plus Giveaways, Plus Elizabeth Bear Likes My Book!

Four days, four signings, four cities, and now I’m going home!  It’s been loads of fun to travel up and down the west coast, meeting people and signing books.  Some great questions, including one from SF about the ways theology could enlighten, or deepen, understanding of markets & capitalism that I’ve been mulling over nonstop for the last couple days.  In some ways those are my favorite types of question because they open up huge new vistas of inquiry, but I always feel I don’t do them justice on the spot, & end up flailing around.  This is the point in the academic version of the book signing where I’d be able to smile and say, “that’s a very interesting question, and would be grounds for further inquiry,” and wink meaningfully in the direction of whatever grant-granting authority happened to be nearby.

I need to go play Security Tango (literally, I opt-out in TSA lines), but here are a few links Which May Amuse You:

First, I’m giving away a few copies of Three Parts Dead on reddit’s r/Fantasy community!  The giveaway doubles as a contest for identifying awesome fantasy writing; for rules and to enter, go to the contest page.  Even if you don’t win, it’s turning to a ‘best lines of all time in genre fiction’ list, which is awesome because genre fiction has some of the best lines.

Also! On the most recent issue of SF Squeecast, Elizabeth Bear (!!!) talks about how much she liked Three Parts Dead.  Which is totally awesome, and makes me feel all kinds of warm and bubbly inside.

Okay, time to go act in the No drama of TSA.  Catch you all on the flip side!

West Coast and Idaho Tour Starts Tomorrow!

Okay, folks!  Three Parts Dead is out in paperback and I’m getting myself psyched for a few days of wild wandering, good questions, and meeting new people.  One update, since the events page wasn’t clear, and Goodreads has it wrong: I’ll be at the Powell’s books on Hawthorne tomorrow, not the Powell’s in Beaverton.

July 25, 7:30 PM, Portland, OR - Powell’s Books on Hawthorne
July 26, 7 PM, Seattle, WA - University Book Store
July 27, 3 PM, San Francisco, CA - Borderlands Books
July 28, 3 PM, Boise City, ID - Hyde Park Books

And with that—I have a bunch of work left to do before I disappear into the Social World, and I think you would much rather I be a productive writer than a productive blogger.  So, with that, I’ll see you around!

Three Parts Dead in Paperback Today!

So you know how it is: you come back from Comic Con, reeling, because you’ve just spent 72 hours solid with 150,000 of your closest friends, and you retreat into editing your manuscript since you don’t actually have all that much time left to edit your manuscript and you’re completely socialled out.  And then you wake up on Tuesday and do the same thing, only to realize around noon that, wait a second, when was your paperback launch date again?

Check it out, guys.  I’m a paperback writer.

If this is your first visit to the site, hi!  Three Parts Dead got me nominated for the Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and a lot of people have been saying nice things about it (including io9, ThinkProgress, Strange Horizons, All Things UF, and others).

The paperback release is a big personal milestone, as I think I’ve mentioned before.  When I was a kid, I didn’t read in hardcover.  I discovered science fiction and fantasy through paperbacks, and when I got around to buying my own books, I didn’t have much money to go around, which meant paperbacks and the library.  The hardcover release of Three Parts Dead gave me a little frission for that reason—I wrote a book I would have loved to find when I was buying books out of my pizza money, but I couldn’t see how Teenage Max would have discovered the book I wrote.  Well, it’s out there now.  Enjoy, Teenage Max!  (And other readers, too!)

On a somewhat related note, The Ranting Dragon asked me to nominate a book in their search / contest to identify The Great Fantasy Novel.  I wrote about what that means, and why A Wizard of Earthsea is the obvious choice—read it here.

 

Comic Con Day One Impressions

Guys guys guys Comic Con is big.

Overwhelmingly insatiably big.  I may have been to larger collocations of humanity (scouting jamborees, for example, are enormous, as are Jay Chou concerts).  I have never, though, been around so many people who were all trying to SHOW ME THEIR COOL THING.  The prospect is amazing.  The experience daunts.  I was daunted.

To preserve sanity I broke yesterday down into small, accomplishable tasks.  Find badge.  Walk across room.  Purchase t-shirt from BBC America booth.  Meet Steve.  Meet Tor folks.  I think the legendary standing-in-line experience is perfect for this con, even helpful.  In line, you have freedom to check out for half an hour, or an hour, or three, to watch the world go by and revel in your little bit of purpose, even if it’s no more than finally getting into that BBC America booth so you can buy a con exclusive t-shirt.

Also I met Felicia Day last night, and she seems very cool!

I don’t have more for you today, and I really should be rolling out of my indulgent hostess’s apartment to find myself some coffee and a bagel and a bus.  For those of you interested in more writing of mine, check out this piece I wrote over on Lawrence Schoen’s blog, about the Everglades and wind and the best meal I’ve ever eaten (sort of).

In San Diego, Cons are Conning

But up here in La Jolla, I’m sitting in a Peet’s Coffee after a hair-raising game of real life Frogger that involved me passing through a breach in a wire fence, crossing a freeway and a couple of six-lane roads in order to find a CVS and replace my long-suffering travel size can of shaving cream, which chose the worst possible moment to give up the ghost—that being halfway through a shave on the first day of Comic Con.  C’est la guerre.

After five years of living in Boston, Southern California feels increasingly weird to me.  The weather is perfect even at its most horrible, so, of course, you want to walk everywhere.  Right?  Only, good luck with that, unless of course you want to drive somewhere where you can walk.  In Somerville, errands are a great way to spend a Saturday: you walk to one square to go to the spice shop, to another square for groceries, a third square because they have a bookstore you haven’t visited in a while.  Not so, SoCal.

Then again, in late July, when Boston’s peaking in the high 90s with humidity, Los Angeles is mid-seventies, dry, and sunny.  And in February, when Boston temperature plummets down to wickedness, even if it never reaches true depths of Michigan evil—well, in Los Angeles it’s also mid-seventies, dry, and sunny.  So there’s that.

As for the con, well, I haven’t reached the floor yet, though I keep hearing joyful rumors—like that the Legend of Korra Season 2 will premier there on Friday, guys guys guys Season twooooooooooo at last it’s been so loooong.  I can give only smatterings of evidence.  In front of the Peet’s where I sit writing this, a man and two women all wearing black t-shirts and con badge necklaces are negotiating whose turn it is to drive their car.  The guy’s black t-shirt has written in red, “I (snake) COBRA” where the (snake) is the logo of COBRA, the heinously ineffectual terrorist organization from GI JOE, only with a little dimple at the top to warp is silhouette into a heart.

On our drive from the airport last night, we passed the Ghostbusters mobile, like from the movies.  A perfect reconstruction, just driving around the streets of San Diego, back brimming with movie-reconstructed props and plastic ghosts.  What do they do with that the rest of the year, my host asks.  I say, it’s probably like those 1930s trucks people drive occasionally around the waterfront in Boston—most of the year is a process of upkeep and repair, waiting for the weather to change.  And now, here, the emotional weather is right.

Paperback Writer! Also post-Readercon catchup!

Today is run-around-getting-ready-for-the-big-tour day, but I wanted to take a second first to say how great a time at Readercon.  Granted, I slunk home on Sunday after having slept only a few hours, and promptly sought out the coolest, darkest place I could find, but man was that con fun.  Times like these I wish I was more of a photo-junkie—instead I end up wishing I could describe five-hour wine-fuelled conversations about books & storytelling & general madness, the description of which, while possible, would involve me sitting here until we were both entirely confused.  One of the best parts of these cons is the ability to hang in person with folks I know primarily through the internet.  Bodies and voices are better than phosphors about 99% of the time, give or take a percentage point.

How good was this year’s con?  Well, it should tell you something that the Irish pub was closed and we still had an awesome time.

On another note, Monday afternoon I checked our mail and found the following giant package waiting:

These paperbacks look awesome, folks.  Here’s a shot of the back cover, with rocking quotes from John Crowley, Jim Morrow, io9, and Felicia Day:

This is a big milestone for me.  When I was a kid, I didn’t get hardcover books—I only had so much money from the pizza place, and one night’s check could buy me maybe three quarters of a hardcover, or three paperbacks.  This is the point at which my childhood self would have bought my book, and he, finally, feels gratified.

Also, well, there’s this:

Matching Monsters with Emotions—Thoughts about Pacific Rim, Hellboy, Eva, and FLCL

I loved Pacific Rim.  Guillermo del Toro is a smart director.  He knows how to be subtle, how to build emotional complexity and thematic depth.  And, miraculously, he’s secure enough in his self-perception to make a movie that goes one step beyond the self-conscious ironic distance one might bring to a giant robots vs. giant monsters movie in 2013, beyond deconstruction & satire, to rebuild the genre with love.  Sometimes this reconstruction feels so on-the-nose that you have to laugh; at least in my theater, there were a lot of laughs at what might have otherwise seemed inappropriate places, but they didn’t feel derisive to me—more like laughs of surprise at the boldness and joy with which the movie embraces scenes, lines, and shots where other movies would feel compelled to wink at the camera in a ‘see, audience, we’re actually way too sophisticated to believe or say this stuff honestly, but we know you’re going to eat it up so here you go’ cynical sort of way.

That subject deserves more words.  But, thanks to Alyssa Rosenberg tweeting a bit about rewatching the Hellboy movies, I spent a piece of last night thinking about internal and external danger, and how they work best when twinned both in scope and texture.  Let’s compare Pacific Rim to Hellboy.  I don’t want to go on to Hulk-length about this, though the subject probably deserves that kind of focus (and an analysis of Pan’s Labyrinth which I only saw once a few years back & so don’t feel competent to discuss right now and anyway this blog’s already way long), so this’ll be cursory, but I wanted to use this space as a scratchpad for the idea.  Maybe I’ll develop it later.

The first Hellboy movie focuses on a series of jealousies and denied emotions at a Bureau of Paranormal Research and Development dedicated to protecting the USA (and the world) against Cthonic creepy crawlies.  Hellboy, the main character, is a “good demon” who has (obviously) identity issues, a strained relationship with his surrogate father, and a tense and complicated romantic history with his ex, Liz, herself a pyrokinetic scarred by her powers’ manifestations.  The introduction of a WASPy FBI agent into this mix further stresses the already-tense situation by creating jealousies between Hellboy and Liz.  Meanwhile, Evil is Brewing in the form of Cthulhu-worshipper Rasputin (yeah, that Rasputin) and his undead Nazi henchmen.  Rasputin wants to bring the old gods back to control / destroy the world; he has a baby old god wriggling inside him, literally.  To accomplish his goal, he’s releasing tentacly demon-dogs into the human world; to stop him, the BPRD must come together as a family in spite of their various issues, and fight back.

Nazi Cthulhu-cultists are excellent bad guys in and of themselves, but they’re even more perfect when set against the BPRD’s dysfunctional-family dynamic.  The BPRD characters don’t know or understand themselves, and are at their best in the heart of that struggle—this isn’t a story of deciding to be Good as opposed to Bad, more a story about internal conflict being a part of heroic life.  Both Nazism and Cthulhu worship (at least in Hellboy) seem to be all about Secret Truths: on the surface the world looks like X, but when you see deeper it is actually Y, and once you understand the world’s Y-ness then all conflict disappears and you can act free of doubt and pain.  Despite their ideology, though, the bad guys in Hellboy tend to have weird and evil uncanny stuff inside them—a wriggly monster in the case of Rasputin, sand in the case of the undead ninja doctor.  (I don’t remember if there’s anything evil inside Ilsa, outside of Nazi.)  Seeming certainty and perfection disguises wriggly horror.

I don’t want to go into spoiler territory with Pacific Rim, but suffice it to say that del Toro shows us kaiju—giant monsters—as overwhelmingly enormous threats, big and intense and vicious and easily identifiable.  The relationships among the protagonists are similarly overwhelming and intense and vicious and unmistakeable—they wear even their secrets on their sleeves.  The towering, city-leveling nature of the monsters gives these big, sincere emotions space to grow.  In any other movie they might seem cramped or foolish; here the heroes need these gigantic naked issues in order to rise against monsters of such scale.

Not that all giant monster movies or anime must take the same tactic!  But the way one handles the monsters, I think, must change to match the quality of emotion.  Neon Genesis Evangelion deals with BIG, horrifying, squicky repressed psychological issues—and so the Angels (Eva’s kaiju) need to be every bit as immense, insidious, and squicky, wriggling into computer systems, boring deep into the NERV center (yes, that’s the real name) where our protagonists live, or straight-up invading main characters’ minds via Hallelujah Chorus (it makes sense when you watch the show).  FLCL’s growing-up story, by contrast, straddles the line between sublime and ridiculous, and deals much more frankly with lust and love—the monsters as a result being similarly over-the-top and as funny as they are terrifying.

Anyway.  Good clean fun.  See Pacific Rim, and get the soundtrack.

On a related note: I had an AMAZING time at ReaderCon.  Thanks so much to everyone I met, and talked with—y’all are great, and I look forward to the next time our paths cross!

ReaderCon this Weekend! Also, Books!

Brief post today as I run around trying to GTD before the world eats me.  For one thing, I’ll be at ReaderCon this weekend, not participating in programming, ut mos est mea—it’s all my fault really, I would love to be on convention programming but something had to give this fall and applying for programming was it.  Next year, in Jerusalem.  Well.  Probably not in Jerusalem, unless sales of Two Serpents Rise really spike in the Holy Land.

Speaking of which, Ofir Touche Gafla’s The World of the End launched a little while back.  If you’re looking for a book that’s weird and surprising without abandoning a strong emotional through-line, this might be what you’re looking for.  Writer husband seeks wife through an afterlife that’s somehow Kafkaesque but not in a bad way, and if you’re wondering what that means, well, just read through chapter two and you’ll see.

S.M. Wheeler’s Sea Change also came out recently; it’s a powerful and weird fractured fairy tale about gender, memory, familial cruelty, and the various ways love and ambition screw us all up, among other things.  A decent chunk of the early action is set on a beach, but I wouldn’t call this a beach read exactly—get it now, and read it in autumn or spring when the world’s shifting around you.

Oh, yes, and I’m writing this via the new Laptop of Heavenly Perfection (to steal Chaz Benchley’s term)—a 2013 MacBook Air.  Just for the sake of experiment, I’ve run all day on battery power, and those commercials talking about the battery’s twelve hour life aren’t fooling around.  Exciting upgrade, especially with travel to come and a book to edit.  I had an excellent run with my 2009 MacBook Pro, but when I put this one in my backpack I don’t even notice it’s there.  And as a one-bag traveler, that’s nothing to sneer at.

Speaking of editing, it’s funny—I’ve written a first draft of another Craft Sequence book since I finished Five Eyes Break (which I think we might be calling Full Fathom Five now, for reasons), and going back & adding scenes, I can tell the difference in my prose.  A little more immediacy, a little more comfort with diving into the abyss.  Which is funny, considering the subject matter of this book.

That joke will be funny in about a year, I swear.

Anyway, all of that’s to say that if you’re at Readercon this weekend, drop me a line!  I’ll be around Saturday and Sunday.  If you’re lucky enough to be there Friday, definitely go to the linguistics panel—John Chu is there, along with other cool folks, and whatever they come up with is sure to be interesting.

Emoticon Science and Moments of Clarity

The two subjects don’t have much to do with one another, outside of accident.  I had one of those moments this afternoon—the moments when you’ve been pouring over the manuscript of your novel, trying to nail down just what this character’s deal is anyway, yearning for those happy golden bygone days when your approach to motivation was to have a giant occasionally invisible carnivorous lizard chase the characters around through the plot, and then all of a sudden while chipping away at something else you write a sentence that, in a few words, sums up the reason you spent October through March banging your head against the wall.

Now all you need to do is edit the manuscript to reflect your new understanding!

Yay.  I mean, wait.

Anyway, on the Other Cool News front, my friend Vlad, who is among many other things a scientist who studies how ideas and other viruses propagate through networks, presented a paper he co-wrote at the recent International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, or ice-wissum.  The paper is a broad spectrum analysis of emoticons!  Smiley faces and the like.  He and his co-authors study the transmission of emoticons via Twitter, how different people get ‘infected’ by emoticons, what cultural boundaries emoticons obey, all this awesome stuff—and he won Honorable Mention: Best Paper!  So, if you’ve ever wanted to know, as in science, what emoticons were all about, who uses them, how they’re used, how they spread, check out this paper.

San Diego Comic Con Update with TWO SERPENTS RISE giveaway!

Hi everyone!  Last couple weeks have been a bit busy for me—combination of editing Book 3 and hosting family from out of town—but some of those responsibilities have eased and I have news about San Diego Comic Con!  The previously-seekret details are now no longer quite so seekret.  Here’s my schedule!

Saturday, July 20 10:00am – 11:00am

Room 7AB

Urban Fantasy: Myth and Magic in the City

Paris, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Tucson, and cities of our own imagination come to life when tales of myth and magic are blended with the urban landscape. These stories are collectively known as Urban Fantasy, and many of today’s popular authors are adding their otherworldly ingredients to the melting pots of modern (and not-so-modern) society. Authors Jim Butcher (Cold Days), Max Gladstone (Three Parts Dead), Kevin Hearne (The Iron Druid Chronicles), Richard Kadrey (Kill City Blues), Marlene Perez (Strange Fates), Kevin J. Anderson (Dan Shamble, Zombie P.I.), and Liesel Schwarz (A Conspiracy of Alchemists) discuss the art of writing Urban Fantasy with Diana Gill of Harper Voyager US.

This looks set to be an amazing panel.  I was on a panel with Richard Kadrey at New York Comic Con last year, which was a ton of fun; drop by and listen for the rock!  The other authors need no introduction, really.  Genre giants here.  I’ll just try not to embarrass myself.  And, well.  If Thirteen-Year-Old-Max is still wondering when he’ll become a Real Writer[tm], being on a panel with Kevin J Frikkin Anderson is a nice clue.  I may, may, have spent an embarrassing amount of my pizza-cook moneys on Star Wars novels as a kid.

Urban fantasy is an interesting term for the Craft Sequence—it fits in some ways, doesn’t in others.  Maybe it’ll come up at the panel.  If not, I should write something about that here!

After, we’ll have:

11:30 – 12:30am Signing to follow in the autographing area, Table AA09

So come over and get your books Signed!  Then, right before dinner—

5pm Tor Booth (#2707) MAX GLADSTONE will sign advanced copies of Two Serpents Rise

Oh yeah, boom goes the dynamite.  2SR ARCs available for signing and general insanity!  As far as I know, this is the first time ARCs of Two Serpents Rise will be available to the general public.  Best Comic-Con Exclusive Ever?  Or best Comic-Con Exclusives Ever?


(Okay, I know I’m competing with the Locke and Key keys and Black-on-black Planeswalkers here, but a guy can dream, can’t he?)

So that’s SDCC.  Look forward to seeing y’all there.  And now, Stupendous Man away!