Tag Archives: interview

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Tobias Buckell on marine conservation and his next novel

I like to keep an eye on what former members of the Futurismic family are getting up to. Back when I joined the crew, one of my fellow bloggers was Tobias Buckell; nowadays he’s too busy with writing novels to contribute here, and bravo to him for that – it’s always nice to see good people getting along in the world.

Toby has just been interviewed by marine conservation site The Reef Tank, and in amongst talking about his connection to the oceans – he grew up aboard a boat in the Caribbean – he drops some hints about his next novel project:

My next novel is called Arctic Rising. For a while now in short fiction I’ve written a few stories that play around with the consequences of failed cities, ecological disaster, global warming, and so on. I’ve never thought of myself as well informed enough to write about these topics, but looking around I see very little fiction engaging these concepts. It comes back to that background awareness I have, I’ve never thought I knew as much as I actually do. Before the hurricane season of 1995, when we lost our boat, divers were talking in the boating community about how much warmer the water was deep below the surface than normal. We figured that might mean a rough storm season, and we were right. One near hurricane and two hurricanes all in a near row.

So I’ve started writing some stories about what happens when the polar ice cap opens up to become a regular ocean as it melts, with shipping traffic and nations jockeying for resources up there. And all that thinking about that with my fellow writers Paolo Bacigalupi and Karl Schroeder convinced me my next book should be about this sort of stuff that’s thirty or so years down the road.

That’s one to watch out for – I’ll be interested to see how Toby’s novel-length work comes out with a near-future setting instead of space-opera scope. If you ever want to run any exclusive excerpts, Toby, you know who to email, right? 😉

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Singularity school with Vernor Vinge

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Puzzled by posthumanism? Looking for an entry-level introduction to this thing that people call the Singularity? Well, sometimes it’s best to go straight to the source – sf novelist and computer scientist Vernor Vinge coined the concept of the Technological Singularity in 1993, so who better to explain the basics, as in this brisk interview at H+ Magazine:

Some folks will say there have been singularities before — for instance, the printing press. but before Gutenberg, you could have explained to somebody what a printing press would be and you could have explained the consequences. Even though those consequences might not have been believed, the listener would have understood what you were saying. But you could not explain a printing press to a goldfish or a flat worm. And having the post-Singularity explained to us now is qualitatively different from explaining past breakthroughs in the same way. So all these extreme events like the invention of fire, the invention of the printing press, and the evolution of cities and agriculture are not the right analogy. The technological Singularity is more akin to the rise of humankind within the animal kingdom, or perhaps to the rise of multi-cellular life.

It’s tricky trying to explain something which, by definition, is inexplicable – which is probably why the Technological Singularity is as hard to pitch at the average layman as at an industry expert. I’m still not sure I “believe” in it as anything more than a convenient metaphor for a world that changes fast enough to alienate people within their natural lifespans, but on that level alone it’s hard for me to think about the passing of the next thirty years – which would see my lifespan little less than doubled – without realising I’m going to feel like a stranger in a strange land on an hourly basis. Hell, it already happens at least once a day.

So, what do you lot make of the Singularity – inevitable geek rapture? Metaphor for an accelerating culture? Or just the sound of comp-sci lips flapping in the breeze at sf conventions?

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Ruth Nestvold interview at Nebula Awards site

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We try our best to keep an eye on the careers of the authors we publish at Futurismic; thankfully it’s usually made easy by them swiftly moving on to selling stories to bigger and better markets, getting a book contract, or accruing award nominations… or sometimes all three!

One such author is Ruth Nestvold, who is a Nebula Award nominee this year for her story “Mars: A Traveller’s Guide”. As such, the Nebula Awards site has an new interview with her, of which the following is a snippet:

Between the short story and the novel, which form do you prefer and why?

I enjoy both, and at the moment I miss writing short stories, I have to admit. It’s nice to have the whole overview in my head, to complete something in a short space of time. With an epic novel like Yseult or my current project, Shadow of Stone, I can’t keep all the elements in my head at once, and I have to keep jumping backward and forward to figure what I’ve done and what I have planned. But the advantage of a novel is that you can immerse yourself in the world, both as reader and as writer. Short stories are better at delivering a punch, a quick, strong impression. I also find them better for experimenting, again both as reader and writer. The database entries I use to tell “Mars: A Traveler’s Guide” would get pretty old if they were used for a whole novel.

To get a feel for Ruth Nestvold’s short story style, go revisit her two Futurismic solo contributions – “The Other Side of Silence” and “Exit Without Saving” – and the story she co-authored with Jay Lake, “The Rivers of Eden“.

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What would you ask Kim Stanley Robinson?

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Kim Stanley Robinson portraitWell, what? If you could put any question to Kim Stanley Robinson, author of the legendary Mars Trilogy as well as the more recent Science in the Capitol series, what would it be? [Image from Wikipedia]

This is not a rhetorical question, by the way. The nice people at Harper Collins are soon to be launching their new VoyagerBooks.co.uk website and getting to grips with the intermawebz, and as part of the preliminaries they’re throwing six of their biggest genre fiction authors on the mercies of six different genre fiction blogs, including Big Dumb Object, SFF Chronicles, SFF World, Speculative Horizons and Book Geeks. The good Mr Robinson has been chosen to appear here at Futurismic, and you lot get to pick the questions.

I dare say it’s a pretty good match; Robinson’s interests – science, politics, climate change and space – are very much in line with the stuff we talk about here from day to day, and I’m sure he’ll be amenable to questions about his writing in more general terms (provided you don’t ask him where he gets his ideas from).

So, here’s the way we’re gonna do it: if you’ve got a question you’d like to put to Kim Stanley Robinson, leave a comment below.

Simple enough? There are some basic rules, though – honest and non-snarky questions only (I’ll just ignore or delete anything silly or rude, I’m afraid, but controversial science and politics are fine), keep them to a reasonable scale (something that can be answered in a few paragraphs or so), and the deadline will be 1800 hours GMT this Wednesday, 8th April 2009. If there are too many, I’ll pick out the best.

Yep, that’s the lot. So, thinking caps on, folks; I’m looking forward to seeing some interesting questions. 🙂

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Bruce Sterling: “People don’t pay attention to novels”

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The BBC has an interview with Bruce Sterling and, despite being a man with a new book to plug (which I’m about 0.25 of the way through reading, incidentally), he doesn’t have much faith in the power of science fiction novels to change the world, despite their greater modern relevance:

“People don’t pay attention to novels. The socially important parts of American communication are not taking part in novels. You can write them but they are not changing public discourse.

“You can also say that everybody in society has moved up a notch and everybody just wants the executive summary.”

[snip]

Science fiction, he says, has as much relevance in today’s world of seemingly relentless scientific endeavour across many different fields as it did in the past when the perception of the pace of change was arguably slower.

He says: “Science fiction writers are not suffering from the pace of development. We’re suffering much less than stockbrokers and financiers from that pace of change.”

That makes a certain amount of sense; after all, an sf writer is trying to steer his imagination through the currents of the near future, while a stockbroker is trying to steer an intangible and evaporating block of digital money that in many respects doesn’t really exist at all… I know which job I’d rather have. 😉