{"id":4931,"date":"2014-06-05T06:47:34","date_gmt":"2014-06-05T14:47:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=4931"},"modified":"2014-06-05T06:47:34","modified_gmt":"2014-06-05T14:47:34","slug":"but-not-without-shame","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=4931","title":{"rendered":"But Not Without Shame"},"content":{"rendered":"

So, David Brin and I have been chatting behind the scenes; as you might expect, he disagrees<\/a> with pretty much everything I had to say on the ol’ Scorched-Earth front.\u00a0 It’s an important issue, one to which I’ll be returning in the near future\u2014 but because<\/i> it’s an important issue, it deserves more time than I can afford to devote to it this week, especially after I lost most of Tuesday to getting my ass repeatedly blown up in a Body-Works Museum near the end of Deus Ex: Human Revolution<\/i>. (I really<\/i> regret falling for that biochip recall back in Hengsha.) So today’s listing is pure self-promotional fluff; a potpourri of newsy bits from the past few weeks that I just never got around to mentioning before.<\/p>\n

\"tahttivaeltaja\"<\/a>First off, I’m going to be GoH at something called “Peterburg\u2019s Fiction Assembly<\/a>” in St. Peterburg, Russia, the weekend of August 15\u2014 or at least I will be, if I ever get through the Gilliamesque application process involved in getting a tourist visa for the fucking place. The bad news is, Worldcon is the same weekend, so I won’t be seeing any of you there.\u00a0 The good news is, Worldcon is the same weekend, so I can probably credit my invitation to the fact that everyone else is in London that weekend.<\/p>\n

Another overseas accolade for Blindsight<\/i><\/a>, this time under its Finnish alias Sokean\u00e4k\u00f6<\/i>: the T\u00e4htivaeltaja award (which apparently translates as “Star Rover”), kind of a year’s-best thing.\u00a0 Juried.\u00a0 No monetary value. And as is usual for any<\/i> translation of this book, the lion’s share of the credit has to go to the dude who translated it, J. Pekka M\u00e4kel\u00e4<\/a>. You all know how dense Blindsight<\/i> is even in this language; just \u00a0imagine having to morph it into a different one.<\/p>\n

Finally: first official review of Echopraxia<\/i>, from Publisher’s Weekly. I copy it in full, because it is short, and because it glows:<\/p>\n

Hugo-winner Watts attempts \u201cfaith-based hard SF\u201d in this dense, fast-moving companion to 2006\u2019s Blindsight set in a late-21st-century world of genetically resurrected vampires, weaponized zombies, and Nobel-winning monastic hive minds. Daniel Br\u00fcks, obsolete in every way\u2014human in a posthuman world, a field biologist despite biology\u2019s merger with technology, an atheist despite religion\u2019s recent triumphs over science\u2014is dragged onto a Rapture-guided ship, the Crown of Thorns, and taken on a mission to investigate possible transmissions from the lost spaceship Theseus. Br\u00fcks is soon trapped between a vampire and a physics-breaking \u201cpostbiological\u201d organism. Watts displays his knack for meticulously researched, conventionally unsympathetic characters, and their complex manipulations give color to an environment in which it is difficult to distinguish bloody catastrophe from \u201cplans within plans.\u201d The novel delivers an intricately inventive and coolly deterministic lesson in the futility of trying to outthink evolution, less a critique of human transcendence than an indictment of its basic assumptions.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I especially liked “difficult to distinguish bloody catastrophe from plans-within-plans”.\u00a0 Not a starred review, though, which I guess means they didn’t like it as much as behemoth<\/i>. (Here’s the link<\/a>: I include it not because it leads to any further information, but just to prove I’m not making this up.)<\/p>\n

Some of you may be especially surprised at the glowiness of this review; I’m speaking, of course, of those who served as beta-readers, and who slogged through a much crappier version of the novel. I’m kind of retroactively embarrassed that I inflicted that on you (I’ve actually decided to dispense with beta-readers in future, save for one or two close confidantes), so I intend to pdfify a copy of the final copyedited version and send it to you all as a gesture of thanks and atonement.\u00a0 Don’t know exactly when that’ll be, but it will be well in advance of the official release date.<\/p>\n

It’ll be better than the ARC. I saw the ARC for the first time last weekend.\u00a0 It didn\u2019t even include the Crown of Thorns<\/i> illustration. That better not be a harbinger.<\/p>\n

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So, David Brin and I have been chatting behind the scenes; as you might expect, he disagrees with pretty much everything I had to say on the ol’ Scorched-Earth front.\u00a0 It’s an important issue, one to which I’ll be returning in the near future\u2014 but because it’s an important issue, it deserves more time than […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,20,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4931","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-the-road","category-public-interface","category-writing-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4931","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4931"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4931\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4934,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4931\/revisions\/4934"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4931"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4931"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4931"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}