My Panels for Arisia

The panel announcements are up for Arisia 2016 and I'm pleased to report I'll be on some awesome ones this January.

First off, I'm going to be on the "Genre Fiction in Translation" panel Friday at 7:00 pm with a whole host of talented writers. Crystal Huff will moderate and I'll be sharing the table with Ken Liu, Sarah Weintraub, and John Chu. Ken Liu has been mentioned a few times here at Ancient Logic, both for his excellent short stories (including one of my favorites from last year "The Clockwork Soldier," and his work bringing Chinese language science fiction into English, including work from Liu Cixin. John Chu is one of his collaborators so I'm very excited to take part in this conversation.

That same night (Friday 8:30 pm) I'll be taking part in The Future of Mars panel with another incredible line-up of writers and thinkers. The Guest of Honor, John Scalzi will be joining the discussion, as well as Ken Scheneyer (moderator) and Jeff Hecht. Having the opportunity to meet the Guest of Honor would be enough to warrant its own post but the idea I'm going to be on the same panel...well, I'm legitimately terrified. And humbled. But also terrified. Mars is a favorite topic of mine and I can only hope that half way through my introduction I don't just turn to Scalzi and go..."Dude, you wrote Red Shirts. That was awesome."

I should be reading my work at some point in the weekend, but my last topical panel is on Monday at 1:00 pm and it was the other offering I was really keen on joining - "The End of All Things: Sociology and Eschatology." Ever since Fury Road, I've been doing a lot of back-reading and watching on post-apocalyptic media. Ever since Veterans Day, I've been doing a little virtual research in a small game called Fallout 4. The panel is moderated by Suzanne, and includes Venetia Charles, and Sarah Smith. My pitch to join this panel was bringing up the state of the post-apocalypse at the moment, from Neal Stephenson's future-forward take on the end of the world, to Paulo Bacigalupi's hard-truth collapse thriller "Water Knife." The other panelists bring some diverse experiences to bear on this topic so it promises to be a great conversation.

One last weird note - all of my announced panels are in Marina 2. Good venue.

Comments

Death's End by Liu Cixin

Having recently finished the last book in Liu Cixin's instant classic "The Remembrance of Earth's Past" series, Death's End, I can only report a feeling of total amazement and awe. There is so much about this novel that blew my mind, that offered different and better ways of viewing the universe. This novel did what I wish more novels would, serve up a new universe entire, evoking beauty and horror, nobility and disgust, in a timeless monument to unfettered speculation. Obviously, in discussing the events of the last of a trilogy books, spoilers are to be expected. I am, however, going to try to avoid discussing much beyond the first 100 pages of the third novel. I read the translation of this novel, as ushered into being by the amazing talent of Ken Liu. Ken has written of a certain prickliness when it comes to translating work. He makes an effort not to anglicize the source material, not smudging away the occasional difficulties in bringing Cixin...

A Reaction to Peter Watts' "Echopraxia"

Peter Watts’ Echopraxia is a side-sequel to his previous hard sf horror novel Blindsight . Daniel Bruks, a biologist in the Eastern Oregonian desert, gets stuck in the middle of a war between a fugitive vampire and a cult of rewired post-humans called Bicamerals, ultimately kidnapped by them as they head towards the sun. The goal of post-human and vampire alike is to investigate a possible alien intelligence gaining strength there, to determine if it poses a threat, or offers a weapon for the two sides as they struggle for advantage. Bruks' goal is simple survival. Reading Watts is a simultaneously bracing and discouraging experience. Bracing because his depiction of the future and the oddities who inhabit it continue to get better and better, his plots more complicated and more involving, his characters less like sock-puppets for his ideas and more like actual human beings (or whatevers). Discouraging because Watts uses his considerable gifts, artistic and academic, ...

The Dorsia Brevia Solution

While "Green Mars," didn't include nearly as much mind-blowing speculative awesomeness as the first book in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy, it did include one set-piece that I enjoyed very much: The Dorsa Brevia Declaration. As mentioned in my review earlier this week, the plot of Green Mars focuses on the approach of a second Martian revolution. The first revolution, as described in Red Mars, was a spasm of senseless violence, mayhem, and targeted assassination, accomplishing little besides the deaths of many, many important characters in the story. As would-be revolutionaries gather in an enormous lava tube named Dorsa Brevia, the central question is how would any future revolution escape the fate of the first. The process, which I'll describe below, was very familiar to me. During the course of my path to teaching history in Middle School, I worked at an afterschool program named Citizen Schools based in Boston. Citizen Schools had its ups and down...

Ancient Logic

Search This Blog