Martha Wells's Blog, page 60

Exit Strategy out next week

Me and Mary Robinette Kowal will be signing at Murder by the Book in Houston on Oct 2 at 6:30.

https://www.murderbooks.com/event/mary-robinette-kowal

If you can’t be there, you can order our books from the store and get then signed and shipped to you.

If you miss that, I’ll be at Brazos Bookstore on Oct 3 at 7:00 to interview Tillie Walden about her fantastic new graphic novel On A Sunbeam.

https://www.brazosbookstore.com/event/tillie-walden-sunbeam

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Exit Strategy Excerpt

Here’s an excerpt from The Murderbot Diaries: Exit Strategy which will be out in ebook, hardcover, and audiobook on October 2.

Obviously: SPOILER WARNING if you haven’t read The Murderbot Diaries: Rogue Protocol

Excerpt



WHEN I GOT BACK to HaveRatton Station, a bunch of humans tried to kill me. Considering how much I’d been thinking about killing a bunch of humans, it was only fair.

Ship was on approach and I was waiting impatiently to pick up HaveRatton’s feed. Since Ship was a minimum capacity bot pilot and had all the brains and personality of a heat shield generator, I was also monitoring all its inputs and caught the navigation alert when it came in. (I knew Ship wouldn’t betray me intentionally, but the chance of it doing so unintentionally was resting at a solid 84 percent.)

The alert was from HaveRatton’s Port Authority, and ordered Ship to divert away from its usual slot in the private commercial docks to another section at the end of the public passenger embarkation zone.

I still had the schematic of HaveRatton from when I had boarded Ship here on the way to Milu. I could see that section of the embarkation zone was right next to the PA’s docks, where the deployment point for the station’s security response team was.

Oh, that’s not suspicious at all.

( more )

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Five Questions: Extreme Weather

By way of yhlee .

1. Have you ever experienced a hurricane firsthand?

Enough that I can't remember how many, but most were tropical storms by the time they got to us. Ike in 2008 was probably the one who hit the hardest where we live. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Ike) Our town is far enough from the coast that it's a place that people usually evacuate to. It doesn't lose power. (God knows how, our power system does not look particularly robust to the naked eye and when I came here as a student the university was always losing power during the Fall semester). When the hurricanes come, you'll see power trucks from other states using the hotels here as bases of operation. Also, we haven't had serious in town flooding since I've lived here. :knock on wood:


2. Have you ever experienced outside heat over 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celcius)?

Yes, probably every summer.


3. When and where was the coldest temperature you have ever experienced?

The upper teens, probably. (Fahrenheit) We have ice storms fairly often in February. And I was almost stuck in a snowstorm in Philadelphia once.

4. Is your household prepared for a possible power outage of two to seven days?

Uh, maybe. We try to prepare for one every time there's a hurricane. We have battery lamps and battery powered fans, but I don't think we do a good enough job on stocking up on non-perishable food. We concentrate on stuff that we'll need if we end up having a lot of friends and animals evacuating from closer to the coast, which is more likely to happen.


5. Do you have a go bag?

We did during the wildfires when our town was surrounded and there was only one way out to Houston, which was also mostly surrounded but also much bigger and a lot harder to burn down. I have a go box of supplies for the cats and a plan. (Cats into carriers into car which I immediately back out of the garage into the street. Then if there's time, laptops, insurance papers, etc.)

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Online Panel

If you missed the Read for Pixels panel last night with me, Kate Elliott and Jim C. Hines, it's now up on YouTube. The topic is Trashing the Rape Trope:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssCQb1opiDw&feature=youtu.be

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Couple of links

* If you need a break today, IO9 has a long excerpt from Exit Strategy, the fourth Murderbot Diaries novella: https://io9.gizmodo.com/murderbot-struggles-to-pass-for-human-in-this-excerpt-f-1828787865?rev=1536185050048


Plus I have three new events coming up:

Tuesday, October 2, 2018, at 6:30pm.
I'll be signing with Mary Robinette Kowal at Murder by the Book in Houston, Texas. If you can't be there, you can preorder signed copies of our books and have the store ship them to you.
https://www.murderbooks.com/event/mary-robinette-kowal

Wednesday October 3, 2018, at 7:00pm.
I'll be interviewing Tillie Walden at Brazos Bookstore in Houston, Texas. You can get signed copies of my books and Tillie's epic SF graphic novel. https://www.brazosbookstore.com/event/tillie-walden-sunbeam

October 27-28, 2018.
And I'll be appearing at the Texas Book Festival in Austin, Texas. https://www.texasbookfestival.org/2018-festival-authors/

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Various Things

* Here's an article about WorldCon by Michael Lee: http://twincitiesgeek.com/2018/09/in-spite-of-setbacks-san-jose-comes-through-for-worldcon-76/

The World Science Fiction Convention, which started in 1939 and has been held continuously since 1946, is the ancestor of almost every geeky convention. Like many others, it is a volunteer-run event, run as a gift to fandom. But because of its long history, the event otherwise known as Worldcon is organized differently from many other cons.


* And here's a new cover design for The Murderbot Diaries: All Systems Red

http://www.marthawells.com/murderbot1newcover.jpg

This will go on the hardcover edition, which is coming out to match the rest of the series, and should be out January 22: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/all-systems-red-martha-wells/1125315290?ean=9781250214713#/


* Also, I'll be appearing at the Texas Book Festival in Austin, TX on October 27-28, 2018 with a bunch of cool authors: https://www.texasbookfestival.org/2018-festival-authors/

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Read for Pixels Panel and Fundraiser

This Saturday, September 8, at 8:30 EST I'm going to be on an online panel discussion with Kate Elliott and Jim C. Hines for The Pixel Project. The topic will be: Trashing the Rape Trope: Writing about Violence Against Women in Fantasy.

Here's more info about the project: http://reveal.thepixelproject.net/voices-and-videos/read-for-pixels/

And you can see the whole author schedule here: http://reveal.thepixelproject.net/voices-and-videos/read-for-pixels/google-hangout-schedule-attending-google-hangouts/


The Pixel Project is at http://www.thepixelproject.net/ and is a virtual, volunteer-led global 501(c)3 nonprofit organisation whose mission is to raise awareness, funds and volunteer power for the cause to end violence against women (VAW) using the power of the internet, social media, and pop culture/the arts.


The fundraising project is here and includes lots of signed books by different authors: https://thepixelproject.rallyup.com/readforpixels2018 There's going to be some signed Murderbot books available on this Thursday.

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Murderbot Info Post

Here's some answers to a few of frequently asked questions about the Murderbot Diaries series:


1) Length:

The series is a novella series. It's put out by Tor.com (https://publishing.tor.com/), an SF/F imprint under Tor Books, that specializes in novellas (https://www.tor.com/submissions-guidelines/#Novella-Submissions-Guidelines) which are works between 20,000 and 40,000 words.

The word counts are:

All Systems Red: 31468
Artificial Condition: 32422
Rogue Protocol: 35204
Exit Strategy: 35811

There was some question about whether the series would be eligible for the Best Series Hugo category next year. Which no, it won't be, as the word count total of 134,905 is too low. (I think the minimum for Best Series is 240,000 something.)

(If you don't speak word count, by comparison The Cloud Roads was 127,731 and The Harbors of the Sun was 146,162.)


2) Are all bot/human constructs with intact governor modules as conscious of their situation as Murderbot? Sadly, yes. Ratthi isn't exaggerating when he says "The practice is disgusting, it's horrible, it's slavery." This is what happens when corporations get to do whatever they want.


3) The Company that made and owns Murderbot is an insurance company. It's a heavily armed insurance company, but it basically sells insurance.


I was going to do more, but the city is suddenly outside digging up my street! Uh oh.

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WorldCon Article

Here's an article on WorldCon by Alexandra Erin:

http://www.alexandraerin.com/2018/08/conventional-wisdom/

This is only my second WorldCon. I missed last year’s in Helsinki because of money and other external factors, but the year before that I made a point to go because that was the year of Sad Puppies Review Books and other satirical or analytical works. I knew I’d received many people’s nods for a Hugo Award, even if I didn’t quite make the shortlist, and I woke up the morning of the award ceremony the year before last feeling an overwhelming (and entirely unaccustomed) sense of humility in the face of how the fandom community had rallied against these gatekeepers, this ballot-stuffing clique of bullies who wanted to tell them what to read and who to like and what to do and who were determined to burn the whole concept of awards to the ground if we did not wholly surrender and give them everything they wanted. I wrote a blog post describing my thoughts and feelings about the whole thing.

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Some Links

* On Liking Stuff (or Not) by Ann Leckie: https://ann-leckie.dreamwidth.org/533018.html
But the fact is, one doesn’t like or dislike things without context. We are all of us judging things from our own point of view, not some disembodied perfectly objective nowhere. It’s really easy to assume that our context is The Context–to not even see that there’s a context at all, it’s just How Things Are. But you are always seeing things from the perspective of your experiences, your biases, your expectations of how things work. Those may not match other people’s.

Of course, if you’re in a certain category–if you’re a guy, if you’re White, if you’re straight, if you’re cis–our society is set up to make that invisible, to encourage you in the assumption that the way you see things is objective and right, and not just a product of that very society. Nearly all of the readily available entertainment is catering to you, nearly all of it accepts and reinforces the status quo. If you’ve never questioned that, it can seem utterly baffling that people can claim to enjoy things that you see no value in. You’ll maybe think it makes sense to assume that such people are only pretending to like those things, or only like them for reasons you consider unworthy. It might not ever occur to you that some folks are just reading from a different context–sometimes slightly different, sometimes radically different, but even a small difference can be enough to make a work seem strange or bafflingly flat.



* It's me! Texas A&M Graduate Wins Prestigious Science Fiction Award https://today.tamu.edu/2018/08/27/texas-am-graduate-wins-prestigious-science-fiction-award/

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