Wednesday, August 27, 2003
Orbital Burn
 
Another Calgary acquisition, one I had gone with the intention of acquiring, was fellow Edge author Adrian Bedford's first novel, Orbital Burn. Immediate conflict of interest statement: I'm published by the same publisher, and Brian gave me a copy. So there's bias. Having confessed that, I can now enthuse. There's the odd rough spot, but I read it while heat-sick and hiding in a basement, feeling sorry for myself, and I still liked it a great deal.

It has a great first sentence, a classic SF first sentence: "One morning, not long before the end of the world, a dead woman named Lou sat drinking expresso in Sheb's Old Earth Diner, one of the few places still open in the cheap part of Stalktown." Lou is a freelance, unlicenced PI. As a privileged, feckless eighteen-year-old she fell victim to "accelerated tissue necrosis nanovirus", released with murderous malice at a party. Now she exists with the help of nanotechnology that rebuilds her body as swiftly - more or less - as the nanovirus causes it to decay, but the nanotechnology wears out and needs topped up, so her existance is as precarious as her tenuous cash-stream. Lou's decay - described effectively - is paralleled by the decay of Kestrel, her home colony, which is about to be destroyed out by an asteroid; the affluent are long gone, and the dispossessed huddle around the Stalk, the space elevator, in hopes of being lifted off in time. Lou is delaying her own departure, knowing that it is likely to mean loss of her livelihood and shortly thereafter, disintegration. When, into Sheb's Old Earth Diner comes Dog, a cybernetically enhanced beagle, who hires her to look for his adopted charge, a retarded, sickly biological android boy for whom he has been caring. The boy has been kidnapped and Lou is the last PI in Stalktown.

If I go much further, I risk spoilers. Suffice to say, Lou comes up against the usual hazards of a down-and-out PI as she moves through the mean and crumbling streets and towers of Kestrel: lawless cops, the amoral elite, the thoroughly untrustworthy ex, and a client with his own secrets. Kestrel is grim, pitiful and memorable: the decaying neighbourhoods, the abandoned luxury residences. This being SF, there are a number of other forces that also cross Lou's path, on her way to a resolution that would be an SF cliche were it not so right for Lou's psychological journey. She was young and still maturing when she died; she has, in a way, been frozen in time. She has a resolution to reach, things to learn about love and acceptance, and the book has a tangible (at least to me) theme. The integration of character and setting, theme and resolution, and the sense of place are the book's strengths, along with an unabashed echo of its influences, 40s and 50s hardboiled PI and classic SF novels.

Some faint damns among the praise. The viewpoint strayed during the first couple of chapters before settling into Lou's head; perhaps in an attempt to solve the information transfer problem. There is some action that sets up one of the key scenes in the book that seems forced and need not; the elements are already there to support Lou's reaction, but are not deployed effectively. But the scene it leads into - I don't think I'd be giving much away when I say it is a courtroom scene - is one of my favorites. Along with the one in which Lou's mysterious rescuer tries to elicit the former party-girl's thoughts about her soul. In Bedford's Universe, humanity, and law, has to accommodate biological androids, the walking dead, and sentient computers.


Con-Version 2003
 
The visitor to Calgary, at lest the one coming into the D-gates, is greeted by the – I decided to dub it a femidactyl, or maybe a chickidactyl – swooping out of the … uhh … fluorescent lights. Perhaps it was to honor the discovery of feathered dinosaurs, and the long sweeping metal columns linking it to its outriders of bat and eagle (not shown) was an artistic impression of a taxonomic tree.

Calgary was hot and smoky with the drift from forest and grassfires; I wilted and was not nearly as social as I had wished to be, so saw little of Friday except the registration line-up. Saturday am I had a 10 am reading (is there ever a good time for a reading) with Lynda, where I read from "Suspended Lives", a short story just published in Julie Czerneda’s Space Inc. anthology. If you're at Worldcon, there will be a lanch party. Tell Julie I sent you. Lynda read the bit of The Courtesan Prince (see Lynda's news page for explanation), where a Reetion pilot (Ann) is improvising her way through the first official encounter with the Gelacks in centuries (including Amel). Subsequently I was on a panel on "Humans in Space", where I felt like the lone technophile among social scientists; I had come prepared to speak on the medical challenges facing humans in space, whereas the panel went off in the direction of the political and social challenges facing the US (mainly) and the world of justifying space travel given the problems of earth. My reference, by the way, for a chunk of my research, is Frances Ashcroft's Life at the Extreme: The Science of Survival on the subject of human adaptation to all extremes of environment, compared with other animal adaptation. Good panel, covered a lot of ground. My other panel was "Babylon 5: Five years after", in which panelists and audience agreed that, yes, it was a great show, but disagreed on where exactly we would mark the point of it becoming great (do we hide the first, or the first and second seasons from people we would like to convert?), and whether fandom is its own worst enemy because we will point out the flaws and expect greatness. (Where I got hooked was Season 2, Episode 2, "Revelations", which is not a bad place to pick it up. About half of the Season 2 episodes are well worth watching and watching again. And Season 3, yum!).

Events I attended were a reading by Dave Duncan from his forthcoming Blades' novel Impossible Odds; the prologue is up at his website and this was Chapter 1, wherein one undistinguished and one too-young Blade are set an impossible task. Lynda has a photograph of Dave brandishing the cover. Marie Jakober had the paperback cover of her award-winning Civil War novel to show (left); that is also due out shortly. A preliminary, very small, image of the Edge edition of her fantasy Even the Stones is up at the Edge site. on the future books page. Dr. Phil Currie of the Royal Tyrell museum gave a talk on "Dinosaurs on SF", complete with book covers ranging from pulp Edgar Rice Burroughs to Greg Bear's Darwinia and Robert Sawyer's Farseer series. Not to mention Jurassic Park. He filled us in on the behind-the-scenes of the feathered dinosaurs story and introduced us to some ofthe bestiary from the Alberta beds. I also heard Tim Hills talk about archery in SF, an expert free-associating about everything from bow design, styles of archery in various cultures, the sharpest points (obsidian, as shown by the researches of a surgeon enthusiast), the fastest fastshooter (2.1 s/arrow), the Mongol Ambassador outshooting the cream of English Bowmen in the ?Tudor years, Cape Buffalo hide ...

We met up with the Edge gang, and brainstormed about titles, the results of which can be seen here.


Tuesday, August 26, 2003
Technologies of Word at MIT
 
Tripped over the MIT OpenCourseWare site, where MIT is in the process of uploading all its educational offerings, and discovered Technologies of Word 1450-2000. Was this a typo, I wondered, on the MIT site? Clicked on the link, and discovered it was not a typo. The course is dedicated to the technologies of publishing, ending with digital publishing. "Word", o'course - though the computer at which Erasmus sits is most surely a Mac. There are also delectable offerings in cognitive science and medical computing, and spaces for many more.


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