And We Shall March

Please Give Tobias Buckell Your Spare Money

(First in a series of reposts you were warned about, but this one is also timely because he's 8 days out and only 40% away from hitting his Kickstarter goal! Almost there.)

I hope Tobias Buckell hits his Kickstarter goal in his effort to bring out the next Pepper book. These works are fab adventure filled with action, fun and thought. I can't wait for my eldest nephew to get a little bit older so I can sneak him my set of the three books out so far. Unlike when I was coming up geek, my nephew will not have to wander in a realm of genre whiteness in search of heroes that look like him. He's gonna get my Buckell and my Minister Faust. He's going to experience a different world.

Buckell's pitch video, which is in desperate need of editing, is entirely too long but please overlook that. If you have a few bucks to spare send some to this worthy project. If you want to know more about the Pepper books beyond what you can find via search, ask away. Buckell is an excellent writer who gets better with just about every outing. He's supreme at adventure stuff, to the point where I actually purchased a Halo book because he wrote it! And I enjoyed the read! It almost (but not quite) made me want to play Halo!

If I could, I would throw as much cash as possible at this project. As such, all I can do is signal boost its existence to folks. Here is a short story set in the world of the novel he's Kickstarting.

(No, I don't know him personally. I met him once at a convention years ago - and of course blogged about it! We talked for maybe two minutes, I haven't significantly spoken to him since. What I have done is read his works as they come out, cuz the man is good at what he does.)

A Fantabulous Review of This Shared Dream in The Washington Post

I'm still working on my Jet Propulsion Laboratory post, so take a look at this instead! I'm not the only one who knows This Shared Dream by Kathleen Ann Goonan s a fantastic work.

Readers of science fiction will recognize some of the elements upon which Goonan draws, in particular the long tradition of time-travel stories and alternate histories, not to overlook those popular novels about secret adepts who manipulate history and run the world. But Goonan doesn’t crank out adventure pulp. While she keeps the reader guessing about all sorts of riddles, she is just as interested in depicting family happiness, the romance of the past, the lingering influence of our childhoods. As a result, she writes beautifully about comic books, board games, make-believe in the backyard, drawing pictures with colored pencils, playing musical instruments, family picnics. At the same time, however, in this novel none of these familiar activities are wholly innocent. For instance, those toy astronauts called Spacies seem to have appeared quite suddenly on the market and spread all around the world, while the young Jill’s comic-book heroine Gypsy Myra clearly resembles Eliani Hadntz.

What Kathleen Ann Goonan Said to the Pentagon's Joint Services Small Arms Project

Yes. That Pentagon. Because Goonan, author of This Shared Dream, is part of the SIGMA think tank.

Long, meaty, fascinating read. Click for the whole!

The more we believe that we are the same as others, the less  we are inclined to hurt them. Portraying others as subhuman gives permission to  harm them. The greater our capacity for imagining the lives of others and  relating them to our own, the more difficult it is to hurt them. The increasing  connectivity of the world is one element that may well widen our circle of  empathy as well as increase our information and knowledge in general. The less  centralized anything is, the more difficult it is to destroy it. That’s why the  suppression of terrorism is so difficult, and is also a good reason to equally  distribute as much information, power sources, and other resources as much as  possible. According to my father, who was in Germany at the time, when  Roosevelt died, Germans were sure that America would leave the war because  their leader was dead. Our government and country survived because our power is  distributed. Germany fell because everything was concentrated in one person.

This Shared Dream by Kathleen Ann Goonan is a Phenomenal Book You Should Read. Now.

Sometimes people I know refer to me as being one of the smartest people in the room. The part of my ego that can’t help but to like being stroked purrs when this happens because it allows me to ignore all of the many other times when I’m clearly Not The Sharpest Tool In The Shed. The part of my ego that is more attuned with Truth eye-rolls, delivers a backhand up the side of my head, and then makes me scan the room to see who isn’t around when that sort of thing is proclaimed.

Who tends not to be in the room at the time? Kathleen Ann Goonan.

If you have been reading this space for a length of time, the name should ring a bell. Goonan is a Nebula nominee and Campbell winner who, when not being disobedient about the beets, has consistently produced a body of short and long fiction demonstrating what it means to be The Smartest Person In the Room. That’s probably why she also teaches at Georgia Tech, and occasionally throws down essays like this one, and has been invited to speak at the Library of Congress. And that's not even getting into her wicked sense of humor.

The woman works at a quantum level. She writes diamond-hard science fiction that never, ever fails to keep humanity, empathy and heart at the core. You know those stories from the golden age about how engineers would look at what the science fiction writers were coming up with in order to figure out the potential of what could be made manifest in real life? In this present day, nanotech experts do the same thing with Goonan’s work. They also ask her to deliver keynote speeches at their industry events.

Goonan is not playing games. She throws down hard, and has done for a long time. She writes with the assumption that you are not lazy or stupid. She writes with the expectation that you will keep up, and she drops knowledge along to way to help you do so. (Which is one of the reasons I’m now reading up about Montessori, another topic Goonan is expert in, because the way she explores educational concepts and theories about brain development in her work interested me enough to learn more.)

To me, equally important is Goonan’s command of America’s cultural history - listen to her talk about jazz here, read my passing reference to her ability to deal with tricky racial issues here - and her unflinching willingness to embrace the flaws of the nation without sacrificing optimism. Women are not disposable constructs in her work, they are at the core. Feminism is not approached with apologia in her work (something I need to hear at times). Science is not a convenient decorative element in her work, it is the engine driving the whole.

Her latest novel is This Shared Dream, the sequel to In War Times (more here) that also works perfectly fine as a stand-alone novel. Like her previous books it has secured massively awesome blurbage from peers operating at her advanced level such as Le Guin, Willis and Gunn. This Shared Dream is a beautiful example of how “science fiction” and “literary” don’t need to be separate concepts when in the hands of someone who knows what she’s doing, and Will Do It With No Fear.

This Shared Dream is the story of the aftermath of an attempt to manipulate time and set up a utopia, centered around the experiences of the family at ground zero of these events. Some members of the Dance family remember the past that has now been replaced, while others of them, such as Zoe and Whens, experience the transition in ways fascinating and heartbreaking. All of them suffer under the disappearance of the lineage founders, Bette and Sam, who as time walkers (my term), vanished into the stream rooted in World War II (and have a gorgeous love story subplot). There are also people out to kill the more aware family members, such as Jill. And everyone - and by “everyone” I mean “the entire world” is manipulated by the terrifyingly awesome power of Eliani Handtz, the woman whose brain came up with the Device, and who is both Shiva and Mary throughout the work. Handtz is devastation and compassion at once. She and Bette share a single minded focus that scares me a bit because of how very much I can relate to that vibe.

Goonan deploys John le Carre-level spy craft in a thrilling, complex plot that takes the tech we have now and extrapolates its potential into the future. She flings a bunch of balls into the air at the start and doesn’t drop a single one as she takes the story home. She is talking about education. She is talking about global development. She is talking about war. She is talking about one-to-one functional and not family dynamics. She is talking about love. She is talking about race. She is talking about the monied and the not-so-much. She is talking about why we war. She is talking about hope. All at once, in this book called This Shared Dream, which is astonishing.

If you’ve been reading this space for a bit, you know that I like mech. The machines NASA sends up to the stars? Rock! I like the engineering of weaponry. I very much appreciate the  the cold beauty of machines as brought to function by human minds that imagined how to make real a P-51 Mustang, or a Ruger Mini-14, or Fat Man & Little Boy, or the fantasy that is Optimus Prime.

That doesn't mean I like war. It just means that for some reason I find the tools of war fascinating and appealing. I like mech. I like pulpy blow shit up. I no longer apologize for that.

But.

When Goonan stands in her work to speak against war in an old school way, as she does in This Shared Dream, I come to the end of this book blinded in tears of joy and hope and wonder, and I start thinking about mech differently. NOTE: I’m not saying she sets out to create a Mjolnir sort of thing with her messaging, because she doesn’t roll that way. Goonan doesn’t do polemics. What I am trying to say is that when I read things like this in the book:

“I was a billion horrors, one after the other, and they all ran through me like a fire, and I couldn’t stop seeing them ... I have been changed. This Device, which I thought was about power, is actually quite the opposite.” He sat down and put his elbows on the table, clasped his hands. “It’s about empowerment, but for everyone. It’s about equality, freedom, education; it’s about the evolution of the human mind; it is about leaving behind our legacy, our habit, of war.”

I hear what I am being told. I see - no, I feel -  the education in my entertainment. And I am forced to think. About my love for mech that often santitizes what some of that mech was created to do. About my largely thinking about war as a general abstract that can't be avoided, save when I'm thinking about war through the specific historical blackitude social lens that is my Pavlovian default, and has nothing to do with the abstract assumption that war can't be avoided. About neuroplasticity, a word I assumed Goonan invented until the thought hit to look it up, was floored over the implications, and then re-read everything I have that she's written with a new eye - as well as gathering dictionaries needed as I slowly suffer through reading the scientist papers about neuroplasticity so I could try to better understand the big picture. About one of the documentaries I saw decades ago about the man primarily responsible for the crafting of The Bomb, and what that did to him - and if you're watching carefully, the rest of the team (trailer here. The full doc here. I'd love to link to two excellent plays centered on The Bomb that were done by my favorite local theater company as part of their Relativity series, but about two years ago they stopped evergreen play posting, which is too bad, so I'll alert you to this PBS play about what our nation did to this man after we were done using him instead. Trailer. I'm not drifting off-point bringing these things up; it all relates in an All Things Flow Into One sort of vibe). About Oppenheimer in tears.

That is what the best hard science fiction does. The best science fiction is the smartest person in the room, without being a dick about it. The best hard science fiction is gorgeous literature that leaves you enormously entertained and your head full of difficult thoughts Beyond. The best science fiction uses its diamond-hard head to drill into your marrow, insert wicked little nanos into your bloodstream, and then back off chuckling as the payload migrates to your brain, where it will set off bombs.

That is what Goonan does. That is what she has been quietly doing for years.

“It is very complex. I am just at the beginning.”

This Shared Dream, by Kathleen Ann Goonan, Tor Books, ISBN-10: 0765313545, ISBN-13: 978-0765313546, available in hardcover and Kindle editions for now.

I wish HD-50 was real. I would drink deeply.

What's in your head in your head?

Ooo. A Review Of One Of Two Books I'm Desperately Eager For This Year

The other one is about zombies.

This one is about lots and lots of things:

But the real power of Martin's work arises from his extraordinary skill as a plotter. A Dance with Dragons follows, by my count, eleven major storylines, as well as assorted minor ones, each with its own rhythm, written in its own voice, and each playing off all the others. Martin will never win a Pulitzer or a National Book Award, but his skill as a crafter of narrative exceeds that of almost any literary novelist writing today.

Auction to Help Writer L.A. Banks - You Could Win This Letterpress Poster By Amos Kennedy Jr!

That's one of the gorgeous handmade letterpress posters created for me by Amos Kennedy Jr. The only way to get one was if you were one of my Kickstarter backers, a close friend/family, my landlord, or you stole one off a utility pole in Hollywood.

I have given this one to the organizers of the fundraising auction for L.A. Banks, who is very ill and dealing with escalating medical costs. The auction opens on June 21 and runs through July 1.

So here's your chance to get a one-of-a-kind beautiful poster made by Amos while supporting a good cause! Go forth! Bid!

Interlude 2: Octavia Butler Edition

In my life, this stands side-by-side with the Litany.

Version linked below found moments ago by accident due to a FanGrrl attempt to speak directly to an celebrity-type on another site. ... but as these things go, he didn't answer. (Yeah, I know. Mock me. I deserve it.)

Source material. (Yeah, I know. Amazon link. Not good, but doing a quick-hit post I couldn't find this book's entry on the publisher's site ... or, frankly, the publisher's site in general.)

Personal context.

Other ways to hear her and many others.

 

This Is How Much I Hate Fantasy Fiction Which As You Know Since I Am A Woman I Hate SO VERY MUCH

I hate fantasy fiction SO VERY MUCH that on Saturday, due to an alert from LA-ist, I abandoned work, slathered Nair on these neglected armpits, jumped in the shower, tore apart my closet and accessories in search of just the right outfit for the Iron Throne (while quoting random passages from the books in my head), then got on a bus for a 45-minute ride followed by a 1/2 mile walk down Hollywood Boulevard carrying my assagai, JUST SO I COULD SIT IN THE THRONE OF THE SEVEN KINGDOMS.

And I signed away all rights to the below for use by someone else's marketing campaign because THAT'S HOW MUCH I ABSOLUTELY DESPISE FANTASY FICTION.

Fuck you, NYT. Thank you, GRRM. By the way, sir, I'm still Pissed Off On Your Behalf over the whole "Doorways" "Sliders" thing, even though you probably don't care anymore and it's not like you'll ever see this post but I just wanted to say.  (A GRRM New Yorker profile. A GRRM tribute song answering the whiners amongst us.)

And by the way? I look damned good in these shots, if I do say so my own goddamned self. HBO had better use at least one of them, dammit! (Click to embiggen.)

Shout Out to the worker bees handling this Iron Throne's visit to Hollywood & Highland, who were so nice and did not freak out when I revealed that I was carrying live steel. One guy took shots with my camera, and the guy running the Official Camera is the one who said DON'T MOVE after the first shot, and then posed me for the other two shots. Thank you, fellow worker bees! I don't know if you are Mundane or Of The Tribe, but by your actions I know that you were quick-off-the-mark enough to recognize that a Geek Tribe member had shown up in the line, and you rolled with it in an Awesome way. Thank you.

 

For the record, I had a cover on my assagai, because you don't walk around in public with live steel that could actually hurt someone and/or alarm law enforcement.

And my LOATHING of fantasy fiction is so very complete that the ring on my finger is a Miskatonic University class ring, which I wear every day BECAUSE I HATE IT ALL SO MUCH.

And and AND the scuffed boots? Scuffed partially from GENERAL DAILY ASS KICKING, but mostly from fleeing invisible giant robots in downtown Los Angeles a couple of years ago.

Silly me. I forgot to point out that my feeling of DESPICABLE FOR ALL THINGS FANTASY OR GENRE HAS LASTED MY ENTIRE LIFE.

Starman, by Jamie Doran and Piers Bizony / holding

The space vehicle is shoddily constructed, running dangerously low on fuel; its parachutes — though no one knows this — won't work and the cosmonaut, Vladimir Komarov, is about to, literally, crash full speed into Earth, his body turning molten on impact. As he heads to his doom, U.S. listening posts in Turkey hear him crying in rage, "cursing the people who had put him inside a botched spaceship."

This extraordinarily intimate account of the 1967 death of a Russian cosmonaut appears in a new book, Starman, by Jamie Doran and Piers Bizony, to be published next month. The authors base their narrative principally on revelations from a KGB officer, Venymin Ivanovich Russayev, and previous reporting by Yaroslav Golovanov in Pravda. This version — if it's true — is beyond shocking.

A Great Day: Kathleen Ann Goonan Talks Jazz And Her Books With Experts In Jazz (And ! SCIENCE !) On The Radio!

My deep admiration for the works of Kathleen Ann Goonan is no secret around here. If you can put up with dealing with what I can't at the moment - the homeport's search engine over there on the siderail - you'll find many more entries about her as person and her as work sprinkled throughout the life of this blog. But you won't find all of them because the search engine kinda sucks.

Anywho.

Yesterday the RSS reader thingy, where Goonan's blog is among my subscriptions, brought delightful news that she was interviewed on Jazz Connections, a radio show on NPR affiliate Interlochen Public Radio hosted by Jeff Haas, and it sounds like it went *great*! Snip:

Jeff interviewed me about the jazz aspects of my novels.  It was a marvelous interview–great questions.  A jazz musician of some renown, he asked me which musician I would most like to be.  This is such a good question that I couldn’t decide, as if I actually had to make that decision instantly before being transmuted into someone, a la QUEEN CITY JAZZ, in which the inhabitants of Cincinnati become American musicians, artists, or writers.  I said Billy Strayhorn, for his depth and mastery.  I might just as well have said Ella Fitzgerald, for her astounding control of her instrument, John Coltrane for the spirituality permeating his work, Bill Evens for his erudition, Miles Davis for his cool, Charles Parker for his heat, his shattering creative intensity. 

But throughout most of  the interview, Jeff, he asked me about jazz and my books–just how and why my books are jazz-based, and why my brain is wired the way it is. 

Also interviewed for this show is Charles Limb, an otolaryngologist at Johns Hopkins.  He uses fMRI to image the brains of jazz musicians while they play.  Terrifically exciting!

In the full post excerpted above, Goonan mentiones that Haas is also a jazz musician. (And also a techer.) This immediately made me think of the fantabulous Campbell/Moore interview of Epic that was so incredible in no small part because the interviewer (Campbell) had WWI Trench Level Experience of his own going into it. The conversation flows differently because of that.

You can listen live and online to the interview by going to the listen link on his siderail. The show airs locally and (simultaneously online ... I think) Saturday at  7 pm (on IPR News Radio), Sunday at 6 pm (on Classical IPR), and Thursday at 10:06 pm (on Classical IPR).

#yay