m. c. de marco

Brief reminder: I'm going to be doing a reading and signing this Saturday at 7pm at Pandemonium Books and Games in Cambridge (Mass, not UK) — that's at 4 Pleasant Street Cambridge, MA 02139. I'm then planning on having at... Charlie Stross http://www.antipope.org/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=1&id=2

I am incredibly sick at the moment, will all the exciting respiratory pyrotechnics that implies, so today I'm going to Think Real Hard about Star Trek, that old SF past-time. It's like playing on your childhood swingset. It's a little small for you now, but it still makes you smile. Like many, I've been slowly rewatching Deep Space Nine ever since it popped up on Netflix. It's been fascinating. On the one hand: Oh 90s! YOU WERE THE BEST! With your adorable WE ARE SO DARK plots that seem like Strawberry Shortcake Goes to Space by today's standards. On the other, in many ways 2012 has already overtaken DS9 as The Future goes, barring, of course, space travel and replicators. Culturally, though, we've zoomed right past the 24th century by the second decade of the 21st. I've been struck particularly by two things missing from the DS9 universe--one unpredictable in the 1993-99 span of the series, and one predictable but unattractive from the creators' standpoint. Nobody uses social media, and nobody wastes time. Cat Valente http://www.antipope.org/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=1&id=917

Just chirping up to say: I'm now in Boston. I'll be doing an event for the MIT SF Society this Friday; and next Saturday the 11th, I'll be doing a reading and signing at Pandemonium Books and Games in Cambridge;... Charlie Stross http://www.antipope.org/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=1&id=2

I think every writer has a genre or subgenre that they admire, but find baffling. Like a snake charmer watching a trapeze artist. Yeah, yeah, the snakes are poisonous, but you've been handling them for years. But that flip? Those... Cat Valente http://www.antipope.org/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=1&id=917

It is a strange thing to post at such a well-known techy econo-futurist blog. That's not my usual hat, see. I'm a fantasy writer, and more particularly, a folklorist and historian. It is literally my job to find value in old things, to show people versions of themselves in ancient stories. Nobody asks me what I think about the future. It's not that I don't have a dog in this race. I am, I know you'll be surprised to hear, a human living in the early 21st century with a vested interest in continuing at least one of those states (human or living in the 21st century--I'm not super picky which). And having just written a time-sprawling posthuman AI novella, it's fairly clear I have thoughts on the subject. It's just that, to belabor a metaphor, your dog is a SuperLabrador with paw-rockets, a tail that can hack wirelessly into the holorabbit whipping around the track, and an honest, loving, loyal cyborg heart. Mine is an old herd-dog, shaggy, dark, beautiful and uncanny, primeval and enormous--and every once in awhile, even though her heart is blood and muscle, she wins as if by magic. A friend of mine said the other day that he'd surprised himself by starting to write a fantasy novel rather than his beloved SF. He felt it was a story he needed to tell, but also confined by what he saw as the limitations of fantasy: that it is essentially about the past and therefore not concerned with possibility in the same way--in fact, by definition a genre of the impossible. A genre of might-have-been instead of could-someday-be. Cat Valente http://www.antipope.org/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=1&id=917

Charlie here: I'm writing this in a hotel room in Manhattan. It's been a long and exhausting week. It started at 4am last Wednesday, when I left home in Edinburgh; I timed the door-to-door travel time to a hotel in... Charlie Stross http://www.antipope.org/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=1&id=2

I had a request for some Russian recipes, so I'm gonna hit you with Salad Olivier over the quiet internet weekend. The problem with Russian Cuisine and Me is that I don't like dill and I don't like sour cream. These ingredients are prominent in like 90% of Russian dishes. So I end up altering things a lot, because I want to be able to eat it. I'll eat the cow tongue and the pickled herring and dammit, I'll even have the chicken jello if I get salt and some thick bread to put it on, but the smell of dill turns my stomach and unless it's swirled in borscht, sour cream is just foul. All of this brings me to Olivier, which is a traditional and much beloved Russian/Ukrainian adaptation of a French dish (far more of Russian cooking is French-derived than you'd think, thanks to pre-Revolution courtly connections with France) often served at holidays. And how you feel about it depends on how you feel about potato salad in general. Here in America, potato salad is an equally traditional dish, served in the summer for some terrible, quasi-demonic reason, since the heat renders this beast even greasier and more inedible than it started out, at picnics and the 4th of July and every barbecue ever. I have begun to suspect that potato salad is an entity unto itself, a pale, globby, tentaclular protrusion from an uncanny shadow universe. No one prepares potato salad, but if you host a barbecue and arrange your picnic tables, grill, loved ones, and beer in the right arcane positions, potato salad will simply appear, glistening white and alone, tasting of interstellar despair. Cat Valente http://www.antipope.org/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=1&id=917

As I was watching the finale of Sherlock last night, a fun little thought experiment popped into my head and I thought you folks would be the perfect lab to try it out in. I hemmed and hawed for a... Cat Valente http://www.antipope.org/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=1&id=917

Hello there! My name is Cat Valente (Catherynne M. if you're nasty reading my business cards) and I'll be your blogger for the next month. I hope we'll have some good times together, some laughs, some tears, and at the end we can sit back and look on our montage reel with a soft focus lens and some mid-90s comfort rock. For those of you (which I suspect is most of you) who don't know who I am, I present a few Facts before I get into the technofuture thoughttery. I'm mostly a fantasy writer. But I've branched out into science fiction in the last couple of years. I dig folklore all the way and a lot of what I write deals with that, even the SF, because we don't just stop telling stories to explain ourselves to ourselves when we have shinier tech. A lot of what I write features what gets variously called "rich language" "lyrical prose" or "I couldn't follow it, can't she use fewer/easier words?" I write a lot of books for adults and have a pretty successful middle grade series going. I've done some time editing but it didn't agree with me. I write fast--I teach seminars on how to write a book in 30 days. I've won some awards, lost several, and I've been at the gig since 2004, full-time since 2006. I blog myself over on Livejournal. I live on an island off the coast of Maine, which is both more and less isolating than you'd think. I live in a village of a few hundred people, a lot of us grow, raise, and/or fish a fair portion of our own food, and connected through a listserv, we have a unique internal economy wherein we barter for goods and services. Once an object has been brought across the bay, it is such a pain in the ass to take it back that it tends to stay on the island for more or less centuries, traded from hand to hand, sometimes bought with money, but mostly not. This includes your physical body: we have three large graveyards on an island slightly less than two miles long. But we are part of the city of Portland, only two miles offshore, and have regular ferry service. Cat Valente http://www.antipope.org/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=1&id=917

I'm 12 hours from getting on a plane (the first of three) in the direction of sunny, tropical Colorado Springs. This weekend, I'm guest of honour at COSine; thereafter ... well, I'll post my convention program and my subsequent itinerary... Charlie Stross http://www.antipope.org/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=1&id=2

In earlier think-pieces I discussed a very normative, predictable, conservative (in the sense of unadventurous) version of the likely shape of the next century. Of course, it's not going to be like that. I have, in general, very little time... Charlie Stross http://www.antipope.org/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=1&id=2

Yes, I'm travelling again, from next Wednesday. (I'll post details of my public fixtures tomorrow: places I'll be hitting include Colorado Springs, Manhattan, and Boston.) While I'm on the road, blogging will be very erratic. So I'm handing over the... Charlie Stross http://www.antipope.org/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=1&id=2

(This will redound to our detriment in the long term.) As you might have noticed, the British public unintentionally elected a rather weird pantomime horse coalition government nearly two years ago. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the... Charlie Stross http://www.antipope.org/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=1&id=2

If this was an American blog, it would be going dark for 24 hours tomorrow in sympathy with the strike against the Stop Online Piracy Act currently before Congress — which might more accurately be named the Rent-Seeking Plutocrats Enabling... Charlie Stross http://www.antipope.org/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=1&id=2

"The past is a different country; they do things differently there."In my last essay I discussed the likely and predictable environmental and technical constraints on writing fiction set in the 21st century, specifically looking at 2032 and 2092 as yardsticks.... Charlie Stross http://www.antipope.org/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=1&id=2

Hi, everybody! After my brief blogging stint here last summer, Charlie graciously offered to let me appear here now and then when I have something major to announce. I do: the fifth and final Virga novel, Ashes of Candesce, will... Karl Schroeder http://www.antipope.org/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=1&id=683

Right now, over at the venerable discussion board known as the WELL, Bruce Sterling and Jon Lebkowsky and having their regular annual State of the World pow-wow, this time for 2012. I always find these fascinating, because Chairman Bruce is... Charlie Stross http://www.antipope.org/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=1&id=2

Just to let you know that between working on a novel ("robot accountants in spaaace!"), torturing the little people who live inside my iPad, and watching the gruesome train-wreck that is the Republican presidential primaries on the other side of... Charlie Stross http://www.antipope.org/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=1&id=2

Back when "Halting State" had just come out, I began having "Halting State moments"—flashes of deja vu when aspects of a work of near-future science fiction began cropping up in the news. Now I'm having Rule 34 moments:"At one major... Charlie Stross http://www.antipope.org/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=1&id=2

This blog gets hit by spammers. A couple of years ago the spam load was pretty bad; then we moved to a server with a new IP address. I reckon the blog spammers are using tools hardwired to go to... Charlie Stross http://www.antipope.org/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=1&id=2