Charlie Jane Anders's Blog, page 35

Come watch me try to hold my own with John Scalzi!

If you’re in L.A. this Saturday, you have NO EXCUSE not to come see me pretending I belong on the same stage as John Scalzi. The two of us will be “in conversation.” This will consist of me running and hiding under a podium, or possibly trying to camouflage myself as a piece of modernist art. That’s happening at 11:30 at the Ronald Tutor Campus Center, and tickets are available here for just $1.

Then at 3 PM in Taper Hall 101, I’m on a panel about “Fantastical Visions” with Robert J. Sawyer and Beth Cato, moderated by Will Kaufman. The full festival schedule is here.

The Origin of Milton Dirth

Milton Dirth is one of the most important characters in All the Birds in the Sky, even though we don’t see that much of him for most of the book. He was in earlier drafts of the book way more. He’s a tech billionaire who has a very pessimistic view of the future of humanity. He believes in the Fermi Paradox and the Great Filter and the Drake Equation, and basically thinks that civilizations that get too advanced tend to wipe themselves out before they can get to other planets.

I wrote a whole origin story for Milton Dirth, which was in the book until pretty late in the revisions. Here it is!

Milton was at a tech conference in Barzolo, when that earthquake happened. And while Barzolo was in disarray and mostly without electricity, some of the Barzolan military launched a coup, leading to a civil war.

Milton and the other tech leaders holed up in their luxury resort for weeks, with the fighting right outside. Slowly, their support staff melted away and their status changed from “neutral guests” to “possible hostages.”

At last, the other techies built a tunneling machine out of bits of kitchen and groundskeeper equipment – and they wouldn’t listen when Milton warned them the hotel was already structurally compromised after the earthquake.

He sneaked out, just as they turned on the machine and the building came down on everyone else’s head. Milton had to disguise himself as a peasant and walk a few dozen miles, witnessing every atrocity you could imagine many times over. By the time he reached the embassy, he knew firsthand that all systems collapse – and that when they do, people will be at their worst.

Top image: UWI Seismic Research Centre

No spoilers, but this was the scariest moment in All the Birds...

No spoilers, but this was the scariest moment in All the Birds in the Sky, for me. This is from the original notebook where I wrote the first draft down.

Last week I went to Google and read from #AlltheBirdsintheSky!...

Last week I went to Google and read from #AlltheBirdsintheSky! Because I was at Google, I picked all the stuff from the book about the Caddies, those mysterious handheld computers that seem to know exactly what you want before you do. And then we had a fun conversation about A.I. and search engines. This video came out great, too. Check it out!

"Not for a second did I ever believe, as a child, that my disability made me any less the hero in my..."

“Not for a second did I ever believe, as a child, that my disability made me any less the hero in my own story.”

- How Being A Special Ed Student Turned Me Into A Lifelong Writer

The Hugo Awards nomination deadline is coming up in a couple...

The Hugo Awards nomination deadline is coming up in a couple days. Here’s your reminder to go nominate something, if you have a membership to last year’s Worldcon or this year’s. And please nominate something you actually read and enjoyed. Don’t nominate something because your friends liked it. Don’t nominate something because it’s what everyone else is recommending. Don’t nominate something to make a Statement, or to score political points, or to piss off the people you disagree with. Just… nominate things you read and enjoyed. The best stuff you read (or saw) last year. That’s all. Image by NelC.

You know what book totally blew my mind and influenced me like...

You know what book totally blew my mind and influenced me like crazy while I was writing #AlltheBirdsintheSky? The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer. I read it while I was deep into revisions and it just rocked me so hard. The way the childhood stuff interlocked with the characters’ alive lives was just incredible. This book is in the back of my mind ALL THE TIME. Picture by Dan Solomon.

"Part of why you put limits on magic in a fantasy narrative is so that there won’t be this..."

“Part of why you put limits on magic in a fantasy narrative is so that there won’t be this sense that you can just get away with anything. Any problem you have, you can just snap your fingers… Magic should never be that easy.”

- I was on the BBC Radio yesterday, talking about our relationship with nature, alongside some incredibly smart people. You can listen to it here (I mostly come in halfway through).

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"They ate pizza naked together, but they weren’t dating or anything."

“They ate pizza naked together, but they weren’t dating or anything.”

- Random quote I just found in the notebooks for All the Birds in the Sky