Interview: Cory Doctorow & Charles Stross at Google

Authors@Google: Cory Doctorow & Charles Stross

Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross put in an appearance at Google to plug their new book, The Rapture of the Nerds.

Cory and Charlie intend to write a third novella in the sequence begun with "Jury Service" and "Appeals Court," and THE RAPTURE OF THE NERDS will consist of all three novellas, possibly with some small additional connective tissue if necessary.

Many distinguished SF "novels" have actually been stitched together from short-fiction serieses like this; the venerable industry term for such a book is "fix-up", which doesn't imply anything deprecatory.

Cover Art: H.G. Wells Covers

HG Wells Screen Printed Poster by Kevin Tong

Interview: Cory Doctorow

Intel Futurist Brian David Johnson talks with Cory Doctorow about what inspires him as a science fiction author and Cory's "Knights of the Rainbow Table" story, which he contributed to "The Tomorrow Project Anthology."

Book Reading: Samuel R. Delany

Samuel R. Delany reads from Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders at St. Marks Bookshop NYC on April 23 2012. Introduction by Brian Evenson, author of "Windeye." 

"Like his legendary Hogg, The Mad Man, and the million-seller Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany’s major new novel Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders—explicit, poetic, philosophical, and, yes, shocking—propels readers into a gay sexual culture unknown to most urban gay men and women, a network of rural gay relations—with the twist that this one is supported by the homophile Kyle Foundation, started in the early 1980s by a black multi-millionaire, Robert Kyle III, to improve the lives of black gay men."

News: Creation of the A.E. VAN VOGT Award

The Winnipeg Science Fiction Association has just announced the creation of the A.E. van Vogt Award (The A.E.V.V.A.). Here's the press release:

Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada – The Winnipeg Science Fiction Association Inc (WINSFA) is delighted to announce the creation of the A.E. VAN VOGT Award (The A.E.V.V.A.).

Exactly 100 years ago, on April 26, 1912, Alfred Elton Van Vogt was born on a farm in Edenburg, a Russian Mennonite community east of Gretna, Manitoba, Canada. By July 1939, he had written his first Science Fiction story and had it professionally published.. He continued to write in Winnipeg until 1944 and it was during this time that one of his major stories “SLAN” was written. By 1995 he was awarded the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award by the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) . He has been the ONLY Canadian Science Fiction Writer to be awarded this major title.

Interview: Patton Oswalt Interviews Harlan Ellison

At the Cinefamily Harlan Ellison event on January 19, 2012, Patton Oswalt crashed the interview and took over from Josh Olson.

Book Trailer: Blue Remembered Earth

Blue Remembered Earth is the first volume in a monumental trilogy tracing the Akinya family across more than ten thousand years of future history...out beyond the solar system, into interstellar space and the dawn of galactic society.

Lecture: China Miéville on Scholarly SF/F

In 2009, noted author China Mieville came to the University of Kansas for the Richard W. Gunn Memorial Lecture series. He spoke for over an hour, covering topics as diverse as the effects of H.G. Wells' vision of the future on the genre and how science fiction sees itself today.

Via: AboutSF

Video: Sci-Fi and the Human Imagination

At our keynote event for the Big Read at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater at John Jay College, award-winning author Margaret Atwood discussed her new book, In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagaination, and the impact that science fiction has had on her life as a reader and a writer. If you didn't make it to The Center for Fiction's recent celebration of genre literature, check out these videos.

TV Trailer: Prophets Of Science Fiction

‘Prophets of Science Fiction’ is an 8 part series that Scott not only narrates but produced. It is a project close to his heart as it investigates the crossover where science fiction becomes science fact. In these episodes, he will introduce and profile great minds of the science fiction genre whose work would later inspire ideas or concepts that are now considered science fact. Some of these ‘Prophets of Science Fiction’ include Phillip K. Dick, Jules Verne, Isaac Asimov, George Lucas, H.G. Wells and Gene Roddenberry. The video shown at the NYCC also contained a rough cut of the first episode of the series which focuses on Mary Shelley and her idea of man creating life in a laboratory.

“I am thrilled to be partnering with Science Channel on this exciting new series. I hope that the audience will find the subjects as interesting and inspiring as I do,” says Scott. You can watch the video from the NYCC below as well as the commercial for the series that is currently airing on the Science channel. ‘Prophets of Science Fiction’ will debut on the Science channel on November 9 at 10PM ET/PT.

Lecture: The Future as Mirror

"The Future as Mirror: How SF Uses the Tomorrow to Understand Today"

Science fiction is popularly understood to be about showing us the world of the future: space travel, robots, immortality, encounters with aliens, mechanized cities, human evolution. But in fact much science fiction, though it may be set a hundred or a thousand years from now, is more about the present than about times to come. Both consciously and unconsciously, the futures science fiction writers present arise from and comment on the way things are today, often with the goal of changing the present or even preventing the future.

This talk shows how this has been true from science fiction’s earliest days until now. It gives examples from books and films of ways in which sf had held up a fun-house mirror to the present, both serious and comic, restricting and liberating.

Interview: Joe R. Lansdale

“A detective writer’s mind, and a science fiction writer’s heart” — Joe R. Lansdale on crossing genres, comic books, martial arts, Hap and Leonard … and some ass-kicking!

Interview: Vernor Vinge on Science Fiction

Vernor Vinge (author of A Fire Upon The Deep and (coming in October) The Children of the Sky) talks about his influences, his novels and the coming singularity...

Via: Reason.tv

Awards: 2011 Rhysling Winners

This post has been revised from the original announcement. The Science Fiction Poetry Association has re-announced winners of the 2011 Rhysling Awards, originally presented on July 16, 2011, during Readercon 23 and corrected on July 23, 2011.

According to Mike Allen’s blog, “the original first and second place winners in the short category were both ineligible due to previous publication in 2009, facts that weren’t discovered until after the awards were first announced.” So, the final 2011 Rhysling Awards winners are as follows:

Short Poem

• First Place “Peach-Creamed Honey” by Amal El-Mohtar
• Second Place “Binary Creation Myth” by Karen A. Romanko
• Third Place “Dogstar Men” by C.S.E. Cooney

Long Poem Category

• First Place “The Sea King’s Second Bride” by C. S. E. Cooney
• Second Place “Dark Rains Here and There” by Bruce Boston
• Third Place “Wreck-Diving the Starship” by Robert Frazier

Cover Art: Sisterhood of Dune

Sisterhood of Dune by Brian Herbert & Kevin J. Anderson will be released in January 2012. The novel is the story of the foundation of the Bene Gesserit order so prevalent in the Dune universe.

Book Trailer: The Final Evolution

The Final Evolution is the fifth book in the Avery Cates series of Noir Science Fiction novels, due out in June 2011.

Cover Art: Armored

Here's the cover of the upcoming anthology Armored by John Joseph Adams.  It will be released by Baen in 2012.  The cover art was created by Kurt Miller.  You can read more about it at io9.

From Starship Troopers and Iron Man to Halo and Mechwarrior, readers and gamers have long been fascinated by the idea of going to battle in suits of personal, powered combat armor or giant mechs. This anthology explores the range of what can be done with the trope, from the near-future powered exoskelton technologies we might be seeing just a few years from now, to the combat armors of Starship Troopers and Halo, to the giant bipedal mechs of Mechwarrior. Featuring original stories by: Alastair Reynolds, Dan Abnett, Jack Campbell, Jack McDevitt, Simon R Green, Sean Williams, Genevieve Valentine, and more!

Excerpt: Embassytown

Del Rey Spectra has released the first fifty-eight pages of China Mieville’s first Space Opera, Embassytown. The book hits shelves May 17, 2011.

The children of the embassy all saw the boat land. Their teachers and shiftparents had had them painting it for days. One wall of the room had been given over to their ideas. It’s been centuries since any voidcraft vented fire, as they imagined this one doing, but it’s a tradition to represent them with such trails. When I was young, I painted ships the same way.

Awards: 2011 Prometheus Award

The Libertarian Futurist Society has released the short list for this year’s Prometheus Awards, which honor libertarian Science Fiction novels. Here's the short list for the Best Novel category:

• For the Win by Cory Doctorow (Tor Books)
• Darkship Thieves by Sarah Hoyt (Baen Books)
• The Last Trumpet Project by Kevin MacArdry
• Live Free or Die by John Ringo (Baen Books)
• Ceres by L. Neil Smith (Big Head Press)

Winners for this category and the previously-announced Best Classic Fiction (Hall of Fame) will be presented in an awards ceremony at the World Science Fiction Convention, August 17-21 in Reno, Nevada.

Book Trailer: Hull Zero Three

Here's a machinima-inspired trailer for Hull Zero Three by Greg Bear.

From what I've read in early reviews, the trailer is inspired by the novel's strong resemblance to many popular first person shooters. The story follows a man who wakes up lost and alone on a ship infested with monstrous creatures. Unlike many games that follow this trope, however, the book is built on the deftly wielded science Bear brings to all of his work.

The trailer was created using the game engine and textures from the Quake 2 World Project, a free, standalone first person shooter video game. Read a three chapters online.