Readings

Robinson in Bath

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

Last night I attending a reading by Kim Stanley Robinson at Toppings in Bath. It was a great evening, but sadly very poorly attended. I do hope that Stan got a better crowd at the British Library today. I appreciate that the weather was dreadful, and that a lot of people had taken the entire Jubilee week as vacation, but if we want bookstores to put on good SF&F events we have to support them. It’s as simple as that.

Anyway, Stan was excellent, and my review of 2312 will be far better for having had a chance to talk to him about the book. I wouldn’t have got that opportunity if there hadn’t been so few people there. We also went whisky tasting at The Tasting Room afterwards. I finally got a chance to try Penderyn, the Welsh whisky, and I’m pleased to say that it was quite good. Now I need to persuade Iain Banks and Mark Charan Newton to try it.

Thanks once again to Toppings for staging the event, for looking after Stan well, and for inviting me along for drinks afterwards. Here’s hoping we get a better crowd for the Iain Banks, Joe Abercrombie, Peter Hamilton and Paul Cornell events later in the year. (And personally I’m rather tempted by Levi Roots in July.)

Kim Stanley Robinson in Bath Tonight

~ Cheryl

This evening I will be braving the winter weather here to head into Bath and attend a signing by Kim Stanley Robinson. It is one of only two UK appearances on this book tour. I know that a number of you have read 2312 already, and if you are anything like me it will have inspired a lot of thought. I have a pile of things I’d like to ask Stan myself, and the chances are I won’t get to ask more than a few, but if you do have any good questions about the book please post them in comments and I’ll try to get them answered.

Winter Is Coming

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

It has snowed in parts of England today. Speculation on Twitter has been that this has something to do with the arrival of George R.R. Martin on these shores — he’s a Guest of Honour at Eastercon. However, I’ll be seeing George at a signing in Bath this evening, and there’s barely been a drop of rain, let alone snow, here.

A much more likely explanation for the bad weather is the Easter vacation. Public holidays rarely fail to bring out the worst in the British weather. There’s also the small matter of the start of the cricket season tomorrow. Should the pitch at Headingly be covered in snow, that will save Yorkshire from a drubbing at the hands of Kent. I expect the weather in Taunton to be fine, though not quite as warm as the welcome that Marcus and the boys will give Middlesex.

Out and About

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Yeah, I know, I have been away from the keyboard. I have been in Bristol at literary events. There’s a Festival on, don’t you know?

Last night I was at Foyles to listen to philosopher Steve Fuller who has written a book called Humanity 2.0. We got a great crowd — Foyles said 90 had booked — and an interesting evening. Fuller was in conversation with Darian Meacham and Julian Baggini, also philosophers, and the conversation ranged through a bunch of SFnal scenarios. David Roden in the audience raised the prospect that post-humans might not be nice people. (I mentioned Daleks in my tweet, but David said he was thinking of Cylons.) It is fascinating to know that lots of academic philosophers are putting serious thought into the question of how we define “human”.

I raised the point that we don’t need androids or aliens as we have a long history as a species of deciding that some amongst us are not worthy of being included in the truly human. Meacham made the very interesting point that the media and the general public tends to treat Oscar Pretorious as more “human” than Caster Semenya. That’s rather scary.

This evening I was in Stokes Croft for a performance of bits of the Kalevala by Nick Hennessy. I can’t speak for the quality of his Finnish pronunciation, but the performance was excellent.

I was also pleased to note that the venue was absolutely hopping on a Friday night. Justina Robson and I are on panel in the same venue next week. I’m looking forward to it.

Erin Morgenstern at Foyles

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

I spent yesterday evening in Bristol at two events. The first one was a signing at Foyles for Erin Morgenstern and her debut novel, The Night Circus, which has been garnering rave reviews around the world.

The event space in Foyles is really nice, and I’m starting to get to know the staff who are very enthusiastic about SF&F. There may be some developments on this front in the New Year.

Erin was very good. Her book has particularly been praised for the quality of its descriptions, and that very much came over in the reading. Also she’s a theater major, so she’s very confident on platform and reads well. I’m looking forward to reading the book. Erin will be at Toppings in Bath on Wednesday night if you missed the Bristol event.

Interestingly the book began life as a NaNoWriMo project, although what was produced in the writing frenzy is very different to the final book (the original didn’t include the now lead character). I took a punt and asked Erin if she had used Scrivener to write the book, and to my delight she began gushing about what a wonderful piece of software it is. This is, of course, a reminder that Keith Blount, the man who wrote Scrivener, will be a Guest of Honour at BristolCon in just over a week’s time. If you are a writer and have been thinking about buying the software, or are a keen user, you really should come along.

The other meeting was founding a local LGBT History group. I’ll be talking more about that later once the website has launched, but it is getting me some very useful contacts.

Moira Young in San Francisco

~ Cheryl

Following up from yesterday’s post, Moira Young emailed me to give me the date of her San Francisco appearance. It being October, she’s part of LitQuake. On October 10th at 7:00pm the Opera Plaza outlet of Books Inc. (in conjunction with the fabulously named Not Your Mother’s Book Club) will be hosting Teenquake!!. That will feature Moira alongside Simone Elkeles, Michelle Hodkin and Becca Fitzpatrick. I know nothing about the others, but I know Moira is good. And hey, YA science fiction!

The Cory & China Show

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

On Tuesday evening I got to attend a reading by Cory Doctorow and China Miéville. It was organized by the Clerkenwell Tales bookstore in London and took place in the nearby Church of the Holy Redeemer. The moderator was Robert Sharp. I videoed both readings. The audio quality is a bit dodgy due to the poor tech and the bad acoustics in the church. Here they are:

After the readings there was a Q&A session, featuring questions from the floor and ones tweeted in beforehand. There was no live interaction with Twitter, but not every moderator is as mad as I am.

During the discussion Cory made a very interesting point about the current attacks on the BBC. He noted that the big media organizations are lobbying hard for laws that will effectively prevent any news organization that isn’t big, rich, and stuffed with lawyers, from operating, things like the Digital Economy Act being only the start. The BBC, a large, publicly-owned news organization, would be able to continue operating under such conditions, making it a threat to any cartel of privately-owned media organizations. It all sounds a bit paranoid, but I have a fair amount of experience of how regulatory politics works in other industries and that makes it a lot more plausible.

China got thrown some real curve balls. The best one was (from memory), “Do you agree that writing novels is a bourgeois activity, and if so should Marxists write them?” China was in the process of a long and sensible answer in which he admitted that novels were pretty bourgeois but refused to abandon any potentially useful weapon, when the event came to an abrupt stop.

An older lady, who it turned out was on holiday from Vancouver, was taken ill (I believe it was a blood pressure problem) and an ambulance had to be called. Robert’s wife, who is a doctor, provided immediate assistance, and a paramedic on a bicycle arrived a few minutes later. By the time an actual ambulance arrived the patient was fit enough to stand, but she was taken off to hospital for checks just in case.

Meanwhile the boys headed back to the bookstore, put a table and chairs out in the street (Exmouth Market is a pedestrian precinct) and did their signing there to keep the crowd clear and allow the medics to work. Here they are in action.

Cory & China sign al fresco

San Francisco Needs Writers

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

With 2009 drawing to a close, we are starting to put together the readings program for SF in SF for 2010. If you are a science fiction or fantasy author who will be in San Francisco at some point during next year, and would like to be considered for a slot in the program, please let me know. I will pass any inquiries on to Terry Bisson and Rina Weisman who are in charge of the program.

Next Up at Chapters

~ Cheryl

It is now March. P-Con is only a few weeks away. Dublin is going to have a lot of top-class SF&F writers visiting. Will there be an event in Chapters? Of course there will. Pádraig Ó Méalóid has been busy.

On Friday, March 27, 2009, from 5:00pm to 6:30pm, there will be a mass signing at the store featuring Oisín McGann, Juliet E McKenna, Ken MacLeod, CE Murphy and Charles Stross. You can find the Facebook event here. My plane is due in to Dublin at 14:45, so I’m reasonably confident that I will be there. However, it doesn’t sound like there will be readings so I doubt that there will be anything to video.

Never Stand Still, Never Sleep

~ Cheryl

It feels like that on the Internet at times. I got all of the Amanda & Neil video uploaded last night, and was going to do a proper post linking them all together this afternoon. However, the videos are already online, and the amazingly efficient Pádraig has already been pointing people at them. Therefore I have hurriedly put my own post together. You can follow the whole thing here. Enjoy.

Neil & Amanda: The Collection

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

Pádraig Ó Méalóid has set up a web page collecting reports of the Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer event in Dublin. There are already a bunch of videos up there. Thankfully all of the people in the crowd taking video sensibly choose to avoid pointing their cameras at me, so the material is work-safe.

If you have more material to add I’m sure that Pádraig would be delighted to hear from you. Meanwhile I am finally able to take a look at the video I shot. The good news is that it doesn’t matter if it is crap because someone else (in fact two someones) has already done a good job.

Update: Marjorie has just posted her video. I am in some of it. Goddess, I look fat! Now the snow has finished I need to get some more exercise.

Neil & Amanda: The Photos

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

And from a party about Irish cheese to an event in Ireland. Here are a few photos that I took during the signing at Chapters. There are no photos of the actual readings, because I was busy holding the video camera at the time. That’s still waiting to be edited.

(And annoyingly the photos are not displaying in the correct sequence. Sigh.)

[shashin type=”album” id=”19″ size=”medium”]

Neil & Amanda: The Reading

~ Cheryl ~ 10 Comments

Well, that was pretty much as expected, apart from the entire store being a mobile phone dead zone, which killed my chances of Tweeting anything. But you know what a Neil Gaiman signing is like, don’t you.

There were hundreds of them. Probably over 500, though no one knows for sure as the store took a policy decision to let everyone in rather than mess with tickets. Neil, very wisely, insisted on a “one item per person” limit for the signing, and as a result he and Amanda got through the line in a little over 3 hours. For a Neil signing, that’s not bad. I’ve known him be signing for 6 or more hours.

But before that there were readings, and songs. The readings came from the forthcoming book, Who Killed Amanda Palmer, which will consist of a bunch of pictures of Amanda being dead in various ways, and stories by Neil as to how she got to be that way. Listen up, because the following is important.

  1. The book is not yet available
  2. The current plan is that only 10,000 signed copies will be produced
  3. You will only be able to buy it online
  4. You should pre-order, or you probably won’t get one

That’s what I understand the situation to be. If I’m wrong, I am sure that Neil or Amanda will be in touch fairly quickly to correct me.

Also Amanda sang three songs, with the help of her trusty ukelele. One of them was the old house song that I so loved last night. It gets better with repeated listening.

The venue looked good too. As Pádraig promised in the video, the store was transformed with drape. Someone had the smart idea of festooning it with a bunch of buttons. They had a life of their own, and every so often during the reading one of them would leap off and try to attack Neil. Fortunately they were only buttons, and having leaped, found themselves stuck on the floor, powerless. It was creepy though.

I have about an hour of video. It needs to be edited and uploaded to YouTube in byte-sized pieces. I will get on with it as quickly as I can. But not now, as I have to be up early to catch a plane.

Talking of planes, Amanda is headed for Australia and New Zealand. The tour dates and links for ticket purchase can be found here. I know that a lot of people from Oceania read this blog. I’m betting that a lot of you like good music. You should go and see Amanda while she is down your way. Because she is wonderful. Trust me on this.

And finally, I was really impressed with the staff at Chapters, most of whom came shyly forward after all of the punters had gone, offering their own copies of Neil’s books to be signed. Most of them had worked a 12-hour day, and they went home very happy. It is a very fine shop, staffed by people who love books. Dublin is very lucky to have it.

Update: Beth, who is on the business end of things rather than rushing around the world, writes to tell me that not all 10,000 copies will be signed, and that the pre-order isn’t actually live yet, but you can sign up to be notified as soon as it is.

A Day in The City

~ Cheryl

Yesterday was busy and spent mostly in San Francisco. It started off at the Fungus Festival in the Ferry Building where Kevin and I got to indulge in more fabulous good food – in particular mushroom ice cream. Yes, candy caps can be used in just about anything that would be good with a butterscotch or maple syrup flavor. Yum!

From there is was on to Borderlands where I picked up a number of books, including Jeff Ford’s The Drowned Life and Kathy Sedia’s The Alchemy of Stone. Ellen Klages was doing a reading of her new novel, White Sands, Red Menace, which is a sequel to Green Glass Sea and sounds to be utterly awesome. The chapter that Ellen read was all about the Kix Atomic Bomb Ring. I confess to having had no idea what a spinthariscope was before. Now I want one.

We had a few hours to kill, which was spent happily with Ellen and Madelaine Robbins in the local Irish pub and then a Thai restaurant. After that it was off to Writers with Drinks. The first thing I should note about this is that the size of the crowd is utterly awesome. By the time we got there it was not just standing room only, it was hard to squeeze anyone else in. Huge credit to Charlie Anders for creating such a successful event.

This month’s theme was “Writers in Drag”, by which Charlie meant writing outside of your usual genre. The evening began with Jaime Cortez who had a fun take on the Snow White story. Stephen Elliott read some poetry with a very flat delivery. Michelle Tea couldn’t make it (abducted by aliens, I presume). Annalee Newitz is working on a science fiction novel. And finally, the headline acts…

Nalo was fabulous. She read parts of a piece of gay erotica, which went down very well with the San Francisco crowd. By the time she had finished (very deliberately before the climax (pun intended)) I was starting to feel sorry for Austin Grossman. I needn’t have, he was brilliant. Now I guess I have to go and buy his book.

Next month’s Writers with Drinks will feature the fabulous cheeseographer, Jay Lake. The date is December 13th. See you there?

Finally the sfnal part of the crowd detached itself and found a very nice coffee bar (thank you, Debbie Notkin). All in all, it was a very successful day. Today, we need to run some errands, but I’m planning to spend much of it vegging out in front of yesterday’s rugby, and cooking.

Blumlein and Shea at SF in SF

~ Cheryl

Last night’s SF in SF began at Eddie Rickenbacker’s, a thoroughly eccentric restaurant just south of Mission on 2nd. I’ve seen weird decor before, but this place not only had a model railway running above our heads, it also had a bunch of vintage motorbikes hanging from the ceiling. One of them had apparently once belonged to Clark Gable, and another had served in the Foreign Legion. The weird old guy mentioned in the reviews I linked to wasn’t in evidence, but they had the largest ginger cat I have ever seen. The food was good. They had oxtail, which is unusual for the USA, and Nick Mamatas had good things to say about their Orange Julius. Cliff Winnig caused something of a stir by arriving in costume direct from the Ren Faire in Golden Gate Park.

Later, back at the Variety Preview Room, Michael Blumlein read part of a darkly funny story about a cremation than went wrong, helped by Terry Bisson and Carter Scholtz who read the parts of a dodgy pair of health inspectors. Then Michael Shea read the first chapter of his latest novel project, Demiurge. The book is told from the point of view of a demon able to inhabit other living forms. Very strange.

All in all, another good night. And next up (on September 20th) we have David Levine and Nick Mamatas reading.

At Borderlands

~ Cheryl ~ 6 Comments

So, having done the Lush thing, I headed out to Valencia Street and picked up a whole pile of books I wanted to buy: Little Brother, Lavinia, The Hidden World – you know the sort of stuff. But I had entirely forgotten that there was a reading due that afternoon. And that is how I made the acquaintance of Jeff Carlson. Now I’ve seen a fair few readings in my time, but I think this is the first time I have ever seen a writer on a signing tour just stand up and talking about writing and publishing for an hour or so, and be thoroughly entertaining. Jeff has a motormouth to rival that of Mr. Scalzi (though his blog is not yet in the same class). What’s more he lives in Walnut Creek. I pointed out to him that he ought to pop along to BASFA once in a while. I think he’d be very popular.

While I was in the shop I happened to notice a movie novelization and put two and two together. The forthcoming film, Babylon AD, is actually based on Babylon Babies by Maurice Dantec. Why is this important? Well, for two reasons. Firstly because the arch-cynic of movie reviewing, Lucius Shepard, thinks that the film has promise, despite the fact that it stars Vin Diesel. And secondly because the film is out this month, which makes it Hugo-eligible in Montreal. And M. Dantec makes his home in Canada these days because (apparently) he has had a falling out with France. Indeed, if the film is true to the book then much of the action will take place in Canada. Interesting.

Also while there I hooked up with the newly arrived Nick Mamatas (who is apparently in the Bay Area to do awesome things with some Japanese folks) and Alethea Kontis, and after the reading we headed off to SF in SF. Time for another post.