People have been telling me for years that I need to start a blog. I've nodded and made interested-sounding noises and, er . . . procrastinated.
Not that I called it procrastinating.
I called it Waiting For the Right Moment.
Well, this morning the Right Moment arrived when I opened up my laptop after a two week vacation, sat down to begin writing and found myself wrist deep in ants.
An hour and a half of laptop surgery later, I had established that the ants were not merely foraging in the intra-keyboard ecosystem of spilled cookie crumbs and coagulating coffee stains, but were actually building a nest in the interstices of my motherboard. Only those of you who have read SPIN CONTROL will understand just how funny and unnerving this was for me. I mean, had the ants read my book and decided that I was a soft mark who would abandon my laptop before resorting to a can of RAID like a normal human being? Or were they coming after me for a piece of the royalties??
Either way, I think it's fair to say that when your computer turns into an ant farm, it might be time to think about sitting down to write a wee tad more often.
So there you have it. The ants have shamed me into action. I hereby launch myself into the blogosphere which has survived so well without me for lo these many years. I wish I could promise to produce an actual self-respecting blog, and to update it with works in progress, scintillating commentary, and profound musings on the Nature of Art, Life and Science Fiction. But frankly I'm Just Not That Interesting. Plus, as the ant anecdote might have led you to suspect, I'm a lazy slob.
That said, I do make my living writing science fiction. And in the process, I spend a lot of time reading science fiction (and science nonfiction) and having random, fuzzy, non-goal-oriented thoughts about, uh, you know, whaddatheycallit . . . SFness? So let's not call this a blog. Let's call it a free-ranging, non-goal-oriented, intentionally time-wasting conversation about SFness.
I look forward to hearing from you!
8 comments:
Hi. This is not so much a comment on your blog entry as the e-mail I would send if the link on your site labeled e-mail didn't take me to your blog instead. First, I love "Spin State" and "Spin Control." Both great fun. Second, I like your "Chickpunk" essay and list, and I wonder if you might think Wilhelmina Baird belongs on it too?
ron
Thanks! It's always nice to hear from readers ... especially the ones who LIKE the books!
Sorry about the broken link. I'll add it to the growing list of things to fix. Along with adding Wilhelmina Baird's name to the chickpunk page. Obviously she ought to be there. She was a major influence on me, and probably on most of the other writers on listed on that page.
Meanwhile, until I fix the contact SNAFU, here's my email:
moriarty@sff.net
Oh, man, I loved Wilhelmina Baird! An ex-girlfriend introduced me to her stuff, and her whole Strip series are some of my most-reread books. I don't suppose you know what happened to her? I heard she died...
Speaking of rereads, Chris, I just finished rereading Spin State and have started on Spin Control a second time, which brought me to your website to make sure you were still writing. :) I look forward to more.
I haven't heard anything about Wilhelmina Baird recently. I guess all I can do is quote Mark Twain and say that I hope the rumors of her death are greatly exaggerated!
For what it's worth, Wilhelmina Baird is a pen name for the Scottish writer Joyce Carstairs Hutchinson. I know she's written stuff under at least one other pen name too, and I don't think it's all SF. So you might be able to track down more of her writing by checking those other names.
I might go do that myself, actually. I know her work was a revelation to me around the time I first started thinking about writing SF. It opened up a whole new way of thinking about the genre -- a real sense that hard SF didn't have to be an old boy's club because there were all kinds of new places to go with it.
Baird's SF demands a lot from the reader -- which is why I think it's been less widely read than it should have been given how good it is. But, man, is there a big payoff to those readers intrepid enough to follow her over the course of a novel.
Happily, Baird's not listed as deceased anywhere that I can find. Her grasp of the cyberpunk genre despite being, hmm, 73 now, amazes me. I'm not having any luck tracking down other stuff under either Joyce Carstairs Hutchinson or Kathleen Fisher, her other known alias. Let me know if you find anything.
Did you know that she did a fourth book after the Strip trilogy? "Chaos Come Again" was set in the same universe, but millenia later, after symbiotes had spread throughout the human race and all the subsequent wars between symbed vs. nonsymbed humans had long since finished. It was probably her least accessable book, but a heck of a lot of fun.
Just found the blog and a big WOOT! Looks like loads of tasty posts up already that'll take me a while to digest.
Read SPIN STATE and loved it. Reread it recently to prep myself for SPIN CONTROL (seems a trend here, eh? ;-) I haven't read most of the posts here yet, but if you haven't already done this, maybe you can spin the yarn of how you decided on the particular science you used in SPIN STATE etc. Like what gave you the quantum bug (and once you caught it, how'd you tackle learning all that in preparation for your story!)
Thanks, SBarret! I like your livehournal page by the way, and I completely agree with you about the Interpreter. That was one seriously screwed-up movie. And not the good kind of screwed up.
About the physics though...
I grew up in a family full of physicists and mathematicians, and that's probably why I ended up being a science fiction writer in the first place. When other kids were playing nintendo, I was tagging along to the lab. The quantum physics-related speculations in SPIN STATE came out of a series of discussions with my uncle, Charles H. Bennett, who was on the research team that carried out the first successful quantum teleportation experiment. So I had the amazing good fortune of being able to send the first draft of the book to some of the top quantum physicists on the planet and have them kick it around and poke holes in it and generally tell me where I had gotten the science wrong.
Since then I've realized that you don't actually have to know physicists and mathematicians to get them to read your stuff. So I've continued to base my SF speculations as closely as possible in current scientific research -- and whenever I stumble on an interesting publication I always email the authors and ask if they're willing to talk to me about what they're up to lately. I now have a big email circle of research scientists in various fields who talk to me about what they're working on, kick ideas back and forth with me during the long process of refining a potential idea into something solid enough to base a novel on.
As for the "preparation" and research ... well, I'm a hopeless geek for whom any day spent burrowing in the basement of the electrical engineering library qualifies as a good day. So part of what makes me keep writing SF is the fun of bringing in a whole new set of scientific ideas with each book.
In SPIN STATE is was quantum physics, in SPIN CONTROL it was complexity theory. And in the book I'm currently working on -- GHOST SPIN -- the science focus lies somewhere in the borderlands between computer science, genetics and evolutionary theory.
Honestly, the science is the easy part of science fiction. For me, at least. Most of the time it feels more like playing hooky to me than having a real job. It's just something I've always enjoyed doing -- and writing SF is a natural outgrowth of that.
Was actually trying to send you an email, but the link on your contact page has a sick headache. Just wanted to say that your website is probably the most informative and straight-forward summary about writing that I have ever had the pleasure to read. I have a question about writing. So hopefully you'll fix the link because I don't think I should put it here. That's all.
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