m. c. de marco

It's just been reported on the Apex Publications blog under the title When doing your job is good news that the other four boxes of copies of I Remember the Future arrived fairly intact. So while Apex is still going to take a hit on the two earlier boxes of damaged and stolen books, things are not as bad as they might have been.

For those of you who pre-ordered the hardcover, Apex will be filling the orders over the next few weeks as quickly as possible. We need to ascertain which copies disappeared and were damaged so we can arrange replacements, so for some of you this may take a little longer. Fortunately, I labeled each book with a post-it note, so we should be able to ascertain which customers need replacements fairly easily.

And for those of you who haven't yet bought the book, or can't wait for your pre-order, check out the Where to Buy page for I Remember the Future.

Yesterday, The Open Rights Group turned three. I'd like to wish a happy birthday and much success over the next year to this campaigning civil rights group, of which I am (needless to say) a member. As ORG's website explains:Politicians... Charlie Stross http://www.antipope.org/charlie/

Seriously, man. I’m doing them a favor. They’re zombies, after all. It’s not like they have rich internal lives. The time for book clubs and PBS has passed for them, you know? And anyway, there’s something oddly soothing about going to a high place with a scoped rifle and picking off their shambling asses. I wouldn’t say it’s a zen thing (it seems inadvisable to use the word “zen” with anything involving firearms), but it does get you into a contemplative frame of mind. At least until the zombies figure out where you are and swarm you. But until then: Bliss. I can’t think of anything better.

Oh wait, I can: If they were Nazi zombies. Yes.

(And no, I really shouldn’t be playing Left 4 Dead right now — waaaay too much stuff to do — but what can I say. Sometimes you just need to go after the zombie hordes.)

      

If you can't afford to have me for tea (and at those prices, who can blame you?) it might be wiser to just bid for me playing the drums...






(I do not play drums. Even when I was in a band I did not play drums.)

It's one of an amazing bunch of things that have just gone up on ebay from the CBLDF, who appear to have released everything cool they've been sitting on this year all at once. You want a character from the Sandman 20th Anniversary poster? You want the background from the Sandman Anniversary poster? The last of the "altfanthingie" Jill Thompson tee shirts? You want the Sandman-Hellboy crossover drawn by Mike Mignola and me?



Then you go to this ebay link, and go shopping for the Holidays...

...

And when all of those things are done and gone and sold, M+E designs will still be there, Emma Straub and Michael Fusco, making amazingly cool posters.

Also, I got a happy call from my editor to say that The Graveyard Book is now in its seventh week on the New York Times children's list. (Two weeks at number one, then a drop to number six, and the last four weeks sitting cheerfully at number four.) I haven't wanted to say anything for fear of jinxing it, but it makes me much happier to still be at number four than it ever did to get to number one. Number One meant that I went on tour and we made a lot of noise; seven weeks later, Number Four means that people are telling each other about the book, and buying it on word of mouth, and that makes me happier than anything.)

Every so often, a memory comes out of the blue and illuminates a bit of the past that I had thought gone forever.I have certain memories from my infancy. I remember my first birthday, and the toy blue rubber motorcycle cop that my Aunt Josie gave me. I have some indistinct memories of standing in the crib in my parents' room, and of being around visiting relatives. I don't remember my first dubjayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09384513739417728991noreply@blogger.com0

There. After a few days of mostly sleeping I'm alive again, although I feel a bit like someone took a glue gun to my lungs. I just threw a whole peeled lemon, a dried cayenne pepper from the garden, some honey and hot water in a blender, and drank it all down, and I think it helped.

Nothing exciting to report, or rather, I cannot remember any of the things I'd planned to write once I had a brain again.

The auction has eleven hours to go. Right now you can have afternoon tea with me for eleven hundred dollars. I suspect that if there's no way that you can make it to New York, and are prepared to wait, the tea could be made to happen somewhere else.

Coraline was all over USA Today yesterday, which was nice. My only concern is that the images that are getting out all look really sweet, and not creepy... I liked The Other Mother and the Omelette though. http://www.usatoday.com/life/l081116_Coraline/flash.htm?gid=781 gives you the gallery. (The omelette one is the third.)

On the other hand, Coraline.com (and theothercoraline.com ) have both got spookier, and have strange and marvellous little films up. With keys to access... one of which I found at http://www.despoiler.org/2008/11/17/my-funny-coraline/. (Yes, I suppose I could just have called Focus and asked, but how much fun would that have been? Also I'd feel guilty about posting the info here if I did.)

Hi Neil! I'm a huge fan with 2 quick questions.

Absolute Sandman Vol 1 appears to be sold out on Amazon and Chapters / Indigo with no mention of availability. Is there going to be another printing soon or should I be desperately searching bookstores for a copy before it's gone forever?

On a related note, are there any plans to release an Absolute Absolute Sandman containing all 4 volumes, with any special content?

Thanks so much! Love your books, love your blog!

I checked, and when you wrote this Absolute Sandman #1 was indeed out of stock everywhere. But before I could write to people and ask, it was already back in print and back up on Amazon. (This is the link) (I notice it's now at full price, not 37% off, like the others, which may well mean that once they sell out of the first printings of Absolutes they'll stop discounting them. Which, if you're putting off buying them for the future, might make a difference.)

(And in the half hour between my checking it was there and now it's already gone Temporarily Out Of Stock at Amazon. I assume they didn't order enough to cope with back orders.)

There are definitely no plans to ever do one 2500 page book. (I feel guilty enough watching people carrying two of the Absolutes in signing lines: a 36 lb book would just be wrong.) However, I can assure you that the Sandman and Death bookends are heavy enough to cope with holding the Absolutes in place. (I'm using mine for other books, but they're definitely working bookends, not ornaments.)

(And brain has trickled back enough to remind me to post this: http://blog.newsarama.com/2008/11/16/update-on-carla-and-lance-hoffman/ -- and to send my best wishes to Carla and Lance for a speedy recovery.)

..

Stop Press: My assistant Lorraine just walked into the office with a G1 phone, for me to play with...

So you can catch the live show of this:

Me, to Wil Wheaton, via IM: Confirming: We’re going to see you next week at Loscon?

Wil Wheaton: I haven’t been able to get anyone on the horn in an official capacity, but I’m still planning on crashing it, if nothing else. Do you have an e-mail address of someone I can pester?

Me: Yeah, I do. Hold on — (sends e-mail address) — That’s the head of programming. Tell him that if he doesn’t find something for us to be on, I will throw the hissy-est fit imaginable.

Wil: Of all the fits you can throw, the hissy is the most terrifying. That should get results.

Me: Oh, it WILL. They will live in fear of me.

Wil: Well, clearly they are wise, and have good survival instincts.

Me: I just want to burnish my credentials as an insufferable prima donna, you know?

Wil: Dude. Come spend some time with me. Learn at the feet of a master.

Me: “Fix me pot pie!”

Wil: Good, but try: “Are you fucking kidding me? Where’s my pot pie?”
“I came all the way here, and you can’t even make a fucking pot pie?”
Then you sort of shake your head, like you’re really disappointed.

Me: Actually, the line I will be using is “Are you fucking kidding me? Where’s my Double-Double?” Because I had as an actual condition of my attendance that I would have an In-N-Out caddy to keep me supplied with Double-Doubles.

Wil: You have to be prepared to throw whatever they bring you into the face of a hapless volunteer.
Can you do that?
ARE YOU READY FOR THAT?
Because it can make you legendary. You just have to be willing to go all the way.

Me: “What the fuck is THIS? I wanted it ANIMAL STYLE!!!! You fucking DWEEB.”

Wil: Yeah, then you open it up, and rub it in his face: “I’m sorry, maybe YOU can find the pickles in this for me.”

Me: And then stuff the remains down his pants. And give him a meat wedgie.
And thus I SHALL LIVE FOREVER.

Wil: WINNAR

Me: Excellent. So, wanna be my In-N-Out caddie?

Wil: How does that compare to: a) lackey and b) flunky ?

Me: They don’t get animal style face smearings.
Anyway, scratch that. You can be in my entourage.

Wil: OMG ENTOURAGE
That’s where I get to follow you around, and act like I’m really important just because I’m following you around!

Me: It’s like you’re rolling natural 20s, because I’m rolling natural 20s.

Wil: I’m an NPC!

Me: Really, is there anything better?

Wil: I’ll finally multiclass, and take some ranks in Insufferable Bastard

Me: You’re your own Expansion Pack, Wil. Live that dream.

Wil: I’m doing it, John. I’m really doing it.

      

There are a lot of stars out there in space — and as we’re constantly discovering, lots of planets around those stars. But how many of those planets are “earth-like”: that is, good for us? And what will it take to reach them? And what if we get there and discover the planet’s not as good for us as we thought? What then?

Eric Flint and Dave Freer considered these questions, and came up with a solution: chuck all of that and find a new way for humans to colonize the stars. What is that way, and how does play out in their latest novel Slow Train to Arcturus? Dave Freer, e-mailing in all the way from South Africa, explains the big idea for you now.

DAVE FREER:

“When we get there, the place stinks.” One of the underlying problems with slower than light interstellar colonisation has always been that it is a long, hard journey and, when we get there, the planet humans had hoped to settle on is considerably less habitable than we’d hoped (Larry Niven’s A Gift From Earth) , or even totally uninhabitable … or has occupants.

Which means we face up to doing all over again. It’s the elephant in room with all slower-than-light stories. Now the problem that my co-author Eric Flint has, is that his African-dwelling co-author still instinctively regards elephants as something that will either trample you or make a really big barbeque. I am not good at ignoring them and hoping that they’ll leave the room. So: when Eric suggested we should do a slowship story - if we could come up with something different, it was the elephant that got targeted. The big idea for Slow Train to Arcturus was born out of the idea that there are probably relatively few terraformable (let alone habitable) worlds out there, compared to the number of stars, and, if you’re going to keep trying star systems — you’re in for a very long trip, because unless you’re going to turn the organic content of your starship to jelly, acceleration and deceleration will probably treble the length of an already long journey.

So: what if the slowship didn’t ever slow down? What if it was a modular ship (like James White’s Grapeliner) that, once accelerated, just kept on going, dropping modules as it approached stars. The modules slowed down instead… and then the human colonists didn’t try to colonise a world at all: They were in a space habitat, designed to make more space habitats. They were colonising space, not worlds. All they need is sunlight and space-debris - something every star out there has. And there is a potentially habitable zone around every star. Of course space habitats or enclosed habitats have not yet been shown to be very long-term viable. This is an island biogeography problem - isolated population have serious issues with diversity and viability. The bigger the island, the less the problem. Or… the more ‘complicated’ the island…

Okay, so I am a fisheries biologist. I admit it. I go to regular fisheries biologists anonymous meetings. Besides complaining about how our wives don’t understand that a man must smell of fish, we talk about the effect of surface area on fish carrying capacity. And, if it applies to fish, it naturally has to apply to space habitats, especially as most people think of space habitats as an enclosed volume with people living on the inner skin. To increase that carrying capacity you have to increase size and volume hugely… but if we layered the habitat, you can increase surface area vastly without increasing volume. That’s a pretty big idea, let alone space habitat.

I’m a biologist. But my co-author is an historian. And any story is really about the people in it not the gadgets or biology, and people are the stuff of history. So we filled our isolated modules with people — the same sort of colonists who once had enough of life under Chief Big-Guy in the Great Rift Valley, who thought Attila the Hun was too liberal, who left Europe for America to chase dreams or to leave religious or state persecution. You know: the misfits, the dreamers, the hardline conservatives, the starry-eyed idealists. The rootstock of all colonisation, of humanity itself. The blokes who didn’t fit back home. The people who colonised America. The forefathers of just about everyone who doesn’t still live in the Great Rift Valley (and I wouldn’t bet on those either). So: What happens when you isolate those fragments for three hundred years. Do we need each other? Is isolation worth it? Who really are losers that society would be better without? Anyone? And how would an aliens species (especially one that didn’t have two sexes at birth) see them?

Now, I’ve written a lot of satirical humor, and some historical fantasy. This book was neither and both. I had to reign in the humor and get into the skin of a hero who was quite unlike me - a pacifist and a deeply religious traditional agrarian. I had to research the cultures of several of these groups and try to present a fair picture of their society. It did bring home just how complex such a seemingly simple society can be and how varied (and really human) the people in them can be too. Of course - I wrote a lot of it. There is humor and satire too.

Also, this is a hard-science book with minimum handwavium. And lets’s face it, in a lot of those the writers get so obsessed with the shiny gadgets and pretty lights that they leave you feeling mentally pummelled with it all. It’s great stuff but not easy reading. But… our society is full of quite complex gadgetry — that we take for granted. When your hero goes into his kitchen he doesn’t explain how the microwave oven he’s using works. He probably doesn’t actually know. And that is the key to writing accessible hard sf that I had to learn. I had to dig into the physics and mechanical side, with the help of some great and knowledgable people — and then let my characters live in the environment without explaining it. They don’t understand it. They just live in it. Heinlein did just this, and if it was good enough for him I guess Freer and Flint will just have to learn to do it too.

And that’s it. Face aliens with humans in a series of habitats - some of which are inimical. Put the species and cultures together. Mix. See what happens. It’s kind of about the future, vast dreams, and the past.

It’s a huge universe, and a long way to Arcturus.

—-

Slow Train to Arcturus: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Powell’s

Read an online excerpt of the novel here. Visit Dave Freer’s LiveJournal here.

      

There you go. Enjoy.

      

Two bits of interest for the science fiction geek crowd:

* Wil Wheaton’s got himself a new gig as a columnist at LA Weekly, and that doesn’t suck. He’s writing, as far as I can tell, about basically whatever the hell we wants to, and that doesn’t suck, either. Go ahead and click through to his debut column, in which he talks about being a Los Angeleno, and be sure to leave a comment so his new bosses will be all impressed with how much traffic and conversation he brings in. Because — again — that wouldn’t suck.

* The fabulous Sarah Zettel writes to inform me of BookViewCafe.com, a collaborative site filled with lots of fiction and other cool stuff, from a whole bunch of famous/interesting writers including Ursula Le Guin, Vonda McIntyre and Anne Harris:

While most of the fiction on the site is free, authors will also be offering expanded work, additional content, print versions, or subscriptions for a fee. Our authors are all professionals with publishing credits in the print world. The Internet is giving us an opportunity to make their out-of-print, experimental, or otherwise unavailable work to you. We love feedback on how we are doing.

Every day, new content available nowhere else will be served up on Book View Cafe: short stories, flash fiction, poetry, episodes of serialized novels, and maybe even a podcast now and then. The content will be archived and available after the posting date by visiting the author’s bookshelf.

It’s just starting out, so give it a try and then check back later as well. And let them know what you think.

      

He could use them right about now. Thanks.

      

I’m warning you ahead of time the following is not a deep thought:

I do get occasionally amused at being a poster child for Science Fiction’s Digital Future when I live in a rural town of 1,800 people with agricultural fields directly to my east, south and west, and Amish buggies clopping down the road on a daily basis. It’s, like, three cheers for cognitive dissonance.

      

One of the perennial questions that I (and every other SF writer) get asked is, "where do you get your ideas?" Harlan Ellison once famously replied, "Poughkeepsie", but the truth is a bit harder to swallow: ideas are all around... Charlie Stross http://www.antipope.org/charlie/

As I’ve noted earlier, I’m fantastically disorganized, and that’s not been helpful in the particular case of sending out books to people I’ve promised them to. However, just the other day, my super-efficient and otherwise incredibly awesome wife delivered unto me a whole bunch of shipping boxes and envelopes, so that I can finally send off these oft-delayed books.

At which point I find I’ve lost mailing addresses and names of the people to whom I owe books.

Because I suck.

So: If I owe you a book, either through a contest here on Whatever or through some other promise, will you please send me an e-mail with your mailing address and the name of the book I promised to send you? Because now I have the tools to send your books, and wish to, so they will not loiter on my conscience. Put “YOU OWE ME A BOOK” in the subject header so I’ll be able to tell your e-mail apart from the rest.

And yes, please send another e-mail to me even if you recently sent one, because, well. My e-mail in-box these days. You don’t want to know.

For those of you to whom I do not owe a book but who think this might be a nifty time to try to snake one out of me: I assure you that while I do not immediately remember to whom I owe books, once they send their requests, it’ll come back to me. And anyway, it’s not nice to take advantage of a forgetful author. Your karma cries out to you. And so on.

Thanks, folks, and to those who have been waiting for books, my abject apologies.

      

I'm sleeping a lot, coughing a bit, sleeping a bit more. During the waking bit I'm mostly listening to Radio 7 or podcasts, and the best podcasts are from The Moth, the storytelling thingummy based in New York I discovered last year shortly before I found myself on a stage telling the story of how I got home from Hamburg in 1977.

(A quick search found it up on the web at http://www.pen.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/2104/prmID/1064)

Anyway, the Moth is a marvellous thing, and needs to be supported. Tomorrow night is the annual Moth Ball. You can read all about it at https://www.themoth.org/ball .
If you're in New York, you could go. It is hosted by

John Turturro

and

Garrison Keillor

and Salman Rushdie will be getting an award. It looks like a marvellous evening of storytelling. There will be wonders and things in a silent auction as well.

And then, in conjunction with the ball, there's an online auction, to support the Moth. Nine things are up for auction.

One of them is me.

Not literally. I mean, you don't get to keep me.

It's afternoon tea. At The Players Club.

Here's the link to the auction:

Enjoy Afternoon Tea with Neil Gaiman at The Players in Gramercy Park

There's two days to go on the auction -- it ends at Nov. 19, 2008 at 11:59 PM EST. Right now you can get afternoon tea with me for a bid over $350.

I hope whoever wins it is nice.

[Edit to add:
Hi Neil,

I am seriously considering bidding on the afternoon tea at the Players in Gramercy Park, and I was curious as to when this event would occur, to make sure I can attend (and not be out of the country due to work). Perhaps I'm blind, but I didn't see it indicated in the auction. Help?

Thanks,
Jeff

P.S: I'm fairly confident that I'm a nice person, and can probably even get a few friends to vouch for me!

That's because the actual when-it-happens of it all is something that will get figured out between the winning bidder and me, and depend on where they are and where I am. The idea is to be able to make it work for whoever bids.]

PBS’ MediaShift Web site has an article called “Pulp Magazines Struggle to Survive in Wired World,” in which I am quoted rather extensively (indeed, I have my own section in the article) about science fiction print magazines, their online counterparts, and what it all means in the long run for literary science fiction. You’ll not be surprised that I am not hugely optimistic about the long-term prospects for the print magazines at the moment, although you may be surprised to discover that I think their current situation has less to do with the Web than it has to do with what they were doing even before then (or more accurately, what they weren’t doing).

I have more thoughts on the state of the pulps than made it into the article, of course. I would share them with you now, but my wife just came through the door with dinner. So that’s what I’m going to do in the short term. Nevertheless I encourage you to check out the article, and I might come back to the topic later.

      

I was watching Operation Petticoat last night in TCM, and I realized two things: first, this is a movie in which the two male leads are made up and lit to be prettier than any of the women; and second, that the film belongs to a dead genre, that of the service comedy. Once it was common to view the humorous side of war and/or the armed services. There was another Cary Grant vehicle, Father dubjayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09384513739417728991noreply@blogger.com6

Once again, the author is the last to know. But I am reliably informed that you can purchase an ebook of Implied Spaces at Baen's online site. dubjayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09384513739417728991noreply@blogger.com5

A small happy birthday post to somebody living and somebody dead.

This is the dead person. I think this may be the funniest 8 minutes of someone staring at you and telling you about his experiences as a coal miner and novelist ever filmed.



And here, from twenty years ago, are both birthday boys. "Independent wealth. And blackmail."

You know, the one that ran on 60 Minutes last night.

1. The dude’s got seriously wacky ears. I mean, I knew before that they were large and stuck out from his head — you can’t miss that — but during the interview I found myself unaccountably fascinated with them. They just, you know, don’t look normal. And I’m fine with that, since I didn’t vote for him on account of his shapely pinnae. Still wacky, though.

2. One thing I find interesting about Obama is that he seems perfectly happy to say “that’s something I’m not going to talk about” when he’s asked a question about something he doesn’t want to talk about. He did that at his first president-elect press conference (on the subject of his security briefings) and he did it again last night on the subject of cabinet appointments. He doesn’t hem or haw or dance around the fact he’s not talking about something, he just says he’s not talking about it. I wonder how long it’s going to take before the press gets really tired of that; they’re used to presidents not saying anything, just in a really long-winded way that gives them something to quote. Obama’s terseness is not to their advantage.

3. I got a big, goofy grin on my face when Obama mentioned that he used to live near Harold’s Chicken Shack. Since he’s in Hyde Park, I know exactly which Harold’s Chicken Shack he’s talking about because I used to live near it too, although not at the same time Obama did (he started teaching at the U of C the year after I left). It’s a little weird to have a president who lives in one of your old neighborhoods and eats at the same fast-food chicken place you did. Also, for the rest of you: Harold’s is the bomb. If you’re not in Chicago, you really don’t know what you’re missing.

4. As I type this I’m having an IM conversation with a friend of mine who is noting that the Obamas are very much like we are, “we” being the polyglot generation of well-educated, relatively affluent 30- and 40-somethings who are the first post-boomer, post-yuppie set of grownups out there. With the caveat that I’m not silly enough to say that I feel like I know Obama or that we share a special bond (a Chicago bond! w00t!), I think my friend is right, and watching the interview last night I certainly got that vibe as well. It’s why — among other reasons, to be sure — I desperately hope he doesn’t screw things up. When you look at your president and for the first time see someone like you, it makes a difference.

Also, I suspect it means I’m getting old. But never mind that now.