Mile High Con, Updates, and Teasers

Made some site updates: cleanup mostly, plus I added a link to another nice review on the review page.

July 26, 27, and 28 were Mile High Con, in Denver, CO. I gave a reading from Looking Glass, as well as a sneak preview reading from my next book, tentatively titled Irreconcilable Differences. The Looking Glass readings are getting smoother. I found a site online that offered a number of good suggestions for them. Particularly useful were the suggestions to print a large-print version of the reading section, and to understand that readings are differently paced from reading the novel yourself, and it's a good idea to edit the reading to take out particularly description that, while important to the story in the long run, will tend to drag the reading down. Sound advice, all from Charles Stross's excellent site, which in turn was recommended on Wil Wheaton's blog. Thanks to Wil and Charles both.

So about this Irreconcilable Differences book.
The truth is, I'm not going to tell you much about it, because, despite having been originally set down last summer (2006), it's still in pretty primitive state, and a great deal is in flux in it. I can tell you that it is set in the same world as Looking Glass. I can tell you that the main characters are Micki Blake, a teenaged hacker girl, and the personality model of an Interpol agent named Rachel Santana. Rachel exists in hardware installed in Micki's body. She's also the narrator.

It's a bit of a different animal from Looking Glass. It's a deeper exploration into cyberpunk in the great plains, where I've lived almost my whole life, and how the waves of technology that pass through cultures effects these more rural places. Not everyone lives in Gibson's Sprawl, so the impact is very, very different. Differences is also a deeper exploration into how the world of Looking Glass works. It digs into the political angle more, and offers more hints on how the collapse of the United States happened.

Anyway. Happy All Hallows Eve, all. Enjoy the candy. :)

-JRS

Some days, guessing right is scary.

Ever wonder what an early induction rig might be like? See this article. When I wrote Looking Glass, I worried that my dates might be so close to the real calendar that it would be laughable when technologies didn't appear on schedule. Now I have to wonder if I didn't put the technology close enough.

Re: Marta Strickland being the poster of the article; as Babs and Buster Bunny so often said, "No relation."

-JRS

Update

Another nice review on Amazon (U.S.).

What one person can encrypt...

What one person can encrypt, another can decrypt, given time. Surplus electronics do make it faster. http://nsa.unaligned.org/index.php

-JRS

Reviews, Readings, and Updates

I'm in the midst of moving to someplace in the Denver Metro area, so I have gotten a little behind in my updating. Okay. A lot behind. It's been a busy month.

New Reviews

I've gotten two more very good reviews, which is always nice. :) The first (by date) was this one, from an Amazon.com customer (who I do know personally). Second is this one. My wife would tell you I squeal like a schoolgirl when I get reviews like these. Try not to picture that. No sense scarring you for life.

Reading at Who_Else Books

Between those two reviews, chronologically, I did my first actual reading at Who_Else Books, in the Denver Book Mall. My introduction went marginally better than the one I did at the Premier Party at Tattered Cover, but it becomes apparent from the photos that I need to /LOOK UP/ when doing these. There are a bunch of other bits of technique I've been reading about - things like, "print out a big print version of your reading" and "expurgate the reading so you don't lose the audience in descriptive passages" (these ideas and many more gotten from Charles Stross's very helpful webpage on the matter. )

Seriously though. Who_Else books is a wonderful place. Nina and Ron are very kind people, who run a great, comfortable, bookstore. The Denver Book Mall is a fine old building, filled with the old book scent that corporate bookstores just don't seem to have. The mall is an eclectic collection of small book stores, many of them trading in used and/or rare books. Who_Else is one of the few stores in the mall that also carries new books. It's a very nice venue to read at.

My wife and I liked the place so much, in fact, that we went back there to hear Emma Bull and Will Shetterly's readings about 3 days later. Those two are pros. Bull's reading style involves guitar playing and is very high energy. Unsurprising, really, since the last time I saw her at a public appearance, she was onstage at Minnecon playing with a band called Cats Laughing. Shetterly's reading style is more quiet. Their writing styles are very different as well, although I confess I'm much more familiar with her work than his. We bought both books, though. Haven't had time to read them either.

Updates

Updated (and slightly recombobulated the inner workings of) the press page to reflect the two new reviews.

-JRS

Quick update

Just a quick update to add another UK book seller that's carrying Looking Glass. And, um. To fix the typo in the ISBN number I was listing. If you have tried to find my book by ISBN and failed, a thousand pardons please. The correct 13 digit ISBN number is: 978-09795889-0-7.

-JRS

Technorati Tags: Looking Glass, technology

Technology in the LookingGlass World (pt 3 of 3)

Politico-cultural impacts on technology and vice versa.
Other factors that have limited the growth of computing technology in the LookingGlass world are the destruction of the American economy, both in terms of dollars for R&D and in terms of dollars to purchase the end-user products. The domination of nations by large corporations will also serve to stifle the growth of technology, as discussed in part 1. Companies in the world of Looking Glass work very hard to stifle smaller, hungrier companies’ access to the market, their ability to develop new technologies, and so forth. Small, hungry companies work very hard to push technology forward and beat the large companies. Corporate espionage is exceedingly common. Corporate life in the world of Looking Glass is an exaggeration of today. It’s paranoid, cannibalistic, short sighted, and destructive, and above all, wasteful of human resources.

One of the big questions I asked myself when I put the LookingGlass world together, both in 1991 when I originally came up with the bones of the world, and in 2004 when I wrote Looking Glass, was “What would the world look like after the fall of the United States?” This begged the question, “What would the world look like after going through the fall of the United States?” and of course, “What made the United States fall?” As with the fall of other great empires, Rome and the Soviet Union, there are no simple answers to any of these. Looking Glass presents one engineer’s impression of what happened, and her memories of passing through that time. Subsequent books in the story present a different view, rather like the old story of the blind men trying to describe an elephant. What the political changes that made our world into my world looked like depend a lot on what part of them impacted your life. And, like the fall of Rome and the fall of the Soviet Union, the average joe (or joanne) still had to earn a living, still had to put food on the table, and so on. By virtue of having survived that time, all the characters in the LookingGlass world found ways to do those things. Not everyone did.

From an economic perspective, as well as a cultural perspective, the great money-generating engine of the United States of America is gone. Only recently, in the history of the Looking Glass world, have the nations of the former United States emerged from the shadow of hunger, so the amount of capital available for luxuries is considerably lower than in the real world. Electronics are the most common, and in more depressed areas, one frequently sees equipment dating all the way back to the present (real world) day, if it still works, and if there’s been no need to upgrade. The pursuit of the shiny and new has slackened considerably, at least in the former United States. This becomes much more important in subsequent books, where the main characters are not corporate employees.

This, then, is the technological picture of the Looking Glass world. Start with the technology of today, add a couple quantum leaps in human-interface technology, and then de-capitalize the picture with the collapse of the United States. It’s a varied technological picture, a weird polyglot technological front where a given character may have technology spanning half a century on their person. This, too, is very much how it is in the real world.

Technorati Tags: Looking Glass, technology