Upcoming reading at the University bookstore

At 7PM on February 9th,  we will be reading from Welcome to Dystopia!
We are:
Eileen Gunn
Elizabeth Bourne,
K.G. Anderson,
Leslie Howle,
and myself.
Here is the link: University bookstore event

Welcome to Dystopia!

The future is now.

Have you had this feeling lately? Snuggling with your next dystopian novel looking forward to the spectacularly failed futures and grim alternate history lines that you can explore and experience while protected by a force-field shield of a book page, did you realize suddenly: wait a minute, this is no longer a parallel universe. No longer an alternate history that had been split away from the main, robust stalk. This is not even in a safely distant future! ... This is... this is much too close to home..... wait.... WAIT, damn it! Let me out! HEY! This is no longer funny!........

You are right. WELCOME TO DYSTOPIA.

This is an anthology of visions of the beautiful, beautiful future where America is made great again.
Edited by GORDON VAN GELDER, the anthology is coming out in December 2017 from OR Books. It features short stories by forty five authors and includes work of eight Clarion West alumni, counting myself.

From Words to Worlds

Neurophysiology and neuropsychology of reading? Psychonarratology? What are these things?
These are some new developments in the humanities that borrow techniques and insights from the experimental sciences to tackle age-old questions: why and how do stories hold our attention? What happens between a story and its reader (or viewer)?  On November 12 I will be teaching a  One-Day Clarion West workshop about it because as an author and a scientist, I find some of this research incredibly exciting, and I believe writers can use it to hone their craft.

The Science Fiction by Scientists Anthology is out!

Today

I am happy to announce that a new anthology of Science fiction short stories written by active scientists and writers who'd trained as scientists is finally hitting the electronic and real book shelves. The anthology is edited by Michael Brotherton, an astronomer whom you know as an author of Star Dragon and Spider Star novels (Tor), and founder of the Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop for Writers. I am thankful to Springer, an academic publisher for their interest in the project, and to Michael for picking up the task and doing such a great job of working with us. This anthology renews the tradition of Isaac Asimov's Great Science Fiction Stories by the World's Great Scientists series, and it is something I dreamed of doing one day -- although I am even happier that Michael has stepped up to the plate first and did all the hard work, leaving to us the pleasure of story writing. We were told to base our stories on real science (as theory, fact, or occupation) but not forget to thrill and entertain, as good fiction supposed to do.
Here is a quote from the original call for submission:  "Our goal is a balanced volume, ideally covering multiple disciplines such as physics, astronomy, biology, chemistry, computer science, geology, planetary science, robotics, etc., without being focused too heavily in only one or two areas. ...  Show us what’s fascinating, exciting, or important about science.  Bring us a sense of wonder.  Share what it is to think like a scientist.
Inspire us to want to support science.  Point out the dangers and responsibility ever increasing knowledge brings.  Write a story that puts the science in science fiction."
Check out how we did!

Back in the day

Yes, I have a story in this anthology, titled The Gatherer of Sorrows. It is inspired by one of the quiet scientific revolutions afoot today: the study of epigenetic regulation of the human genome in general and of epigenetic inheritance in particular.  As I write this post I have not yet received my author's copy. I hope to add more material to this post once I get to read the whole book!  In the meantime, here are links to other resources related to this anthology:
Available from Amazon
A review in Nature Physics

Exploration narrative, magic, and the Thing

So, "And Then We ate the Dogs" -- some thoughts triggered by the panel discussion at ICFA, and by reading Locating the Thing: the Antarctic as Alien space in John W. Campbell's "Who goes there?" an article by Elizabeth Leane, published in Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 32, No. 2 (Jul., 2005), pp. 225-239.

Without delving into exploration as a human endeavor and the reasons behind it,  let us just assume as a default that at least some societies were, are, and will foster the enterprise of exploration and at least some people in all societies will be exploring whatever they can get to explore, either on their own or as part of an organized enterprise. What I want to discuss instead is why an exploration narrative invites, more so, can't help being perfused with the fantastic, which let it readily colonize science fiction when the latter came along as a genre.

Here is what I think may be the answer. All starts with the capacity of a human mind to generate ideas of the fantastic, wondrous, and miraculous.  I believe it is innate, something of a side effect of a highly developed consciousness. Our minds are figment generators as well as consumers, and  this ongoing "magical thinking"  may be a just another part of a healthy relationship with the world and reality, as important as its opposite -- the operational assumption that the world is regular, understood, predictable, and mundane. The fantastic is brain's sugar, the mundane is its oxygen.  And the fantastic, in this context, needn't be a fully developed Narnia or Skyrim, it can also be all kinds of small, everyday, sometimes deeply personal "magical" associations, explanations, fables that we generate spontaneously. It can be something as trifle as "crows carefully swap plant tags in my vegetable garden" or "rocks self-generate underground in wintertime and then work their way to the surface". 
    
If so, it is not surprising that the fantastic needs a legitimate place, a safe harbor where it can dwell unmolested and unquestioned by the mundane and regular; and what better place than the terra incognita beyond the boundary of the well-known world? Thus Coleridge uses a sea voyage to the South Pole, and before him, Mandeville needs a journey to the Arctic to introduce strange creatures and occurrences; let's also not forget Gulliver's travels.

As the world became more and more explored, mapped, and regularized, and the terra incognita shrank, new dwellings for the fantastic had to be found. Mars became one of these places in the 19th century, boosted by the notorious discovery of the martian "canals".  And the space, of course, the cosmos, has proved the best of them all. It is practically infinite. It can accommodate endless output of our figment machines. As if the Universe was not big enough, however, we are already claiming a multitude of parallel Universes for the same purpose. Not to mention rounding up virtual realities, refurbishing the past through time travel, and carving out new caverns of terra incognita in zones of urban decay or natural disaster.

There are, I will argue, a couple of more reasons other than simply territorial, that solidify the union of exploration and fantasy, and these reasons may have to do with mental, physical, even biological effects the endeavor of exploration appears to have on an explorer. The unknown world both fosters conditions where fantastic becomes more prominent on the brain, and forces on a human something that rightfully belongs to the realm of the fantastic: the metamorphosis. 

ICFA 2016

Earlier this month I was at the annual conference of the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts -- my first time attending this truly fantastic conference, which mixes scholars and writers of speculative fiction in an Orlando area hotel complete with a luscious pool and nearby -- a natural pond where fat carp dig holes in the muck and where one can readily spot off a view deck an alligator's snout sticking out of the water (besides, where else can one glimpse Ellen Datlow with a fishing rod, standing over that pond and fishing, no doubt, for the alligator?)
I had a great, great time, and I want to say big thanks to the incomparable Karen Burnham who invited me to attend the conference.
I took part in the panel cheerfully titled "And then we ate the dogs" where we looked at historic relationships between exploration narratives and speculative fiction, in particular the science fiction of space exploration. Moderated by the awesome  Siobhan Carrol, an author, scholar, and my Clarion West workshop classmate, we poked at the tropes of exploration/expansion into the strange and new, the romantic explorer, and last but not the least, the disaster.
I'm still mulling about all that, and I figured I might as well put some thoughts and impressions from the panel and from my homework for the panel, on paper (digital "paper," at any rate). But since I cannot compose it fast enough it will have to be in the next post.
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Help! There is science in my fiction!

On Sunday, February 22nd I will be teaching a Clarion West One-day Workshop. As follows from its title (see above) this workshop is about writing science and scientists in science fiction. I am looking forward to it!
For details and registration follow the link here.