Farspace 2 Now Available!

Finally, the long-awaited Farspace 2 anthology is available. I just received the proof today and it looks great. This is the longest Utility Fog Press anthology to date. In addition to the great cover by Carla Ralston and Lisa Cobb, it has stories and poetry from 19 authors, and b&w interior artwork from 3 artists as a bonus.

Here's a copy of the cover to whet your appetite.


Check out Farspace 2 and our other great anthologies at UtilityFogPress.com.

successful Novacon 40

I'm just back from Novacon 40 at the Park Inn, Nottingham. This is my second Novacon and, as with the last, it was a relaxing conference with a comfortable schedule almost completely opposite of the hectic Eastercons. Even more surprising, due to the relatively small scale, this year there were close to a dozen top-level authors in attendance. This lead, inevitably, to some very interesting and often humourous panel sessions. Arguably one of the most enlightening sessions discussed realistic apocalypse scenarios and included two con members who work in emergence response planning.

The conference was also successful for me. Last year at Novacon 39 was the first time I had publicly exhibited artwork and I managed to sell 2 pieces (Alien Seashore and Alone). Eastercon 2010, despite having more people, was less successful for me. So I went into Novacon 40 trying to learn from my past experience and was cautiously optimistic. I brought with me eight pieces and managed to sell four (Showdown, Aliens, Looking In, Full Steam Ahead), surpassing my total previous sales! All of these images will be posted on my Deviant Art (edwinhrydberg.daportfolio.com) and Artwanted (www.artwanted.com/ehrydberg) portfolios shortly and will be available for purchase from the Artwanted site.

Recovering from the writing group

Got a grilling today at my writing group (York Novelists Society) over my first six chapters of Mindform Ascension (wt). Not bad, just...detailed. It lasted over an hour and I felt like I'd been through another thesis defense!

Still, it's all good. That's how you know you have a good group. They're not afraid to ask the hard questions and you're not afraid of them asking the hard questions because we're all there to make our novels the best they can be.

Now to finish-up revisions on chapters 7-12.

It's been a while...

...but now I'm back from the temporary oblivion of distraction, revision, and fixing up the house.

Summer is always...well...summer, full of its own set of distractions. Still, YNS (the York Novelists Society) marched on and, with their helpful comments, I've completed the revision of chapters 1-6 in Mindform Ascension and I've recently begun chapters 7-12. I'm revising in blocks because that seems to be the way the story works, with each 6 chapters (was 4--consequences of revision) being a unofficial segment of the story.

I've thought about sending a package out now to agents, but I see enough significant changes in the story coming that I want to finish the complete revision before passing it around to the big boys (and girls). Really want to get this done, though (hopefully by year's end) because I'm itching to start up again on something new--either the Gateway series or Poisonous Garden.

As for what else is happening--I'm planning to start an Open University course on web design shortly, and I'm going to try and get involved in the Creative Networks West Yorkshire group that meets monthly in Leeds--I hope to find someone to work on a fantasy graphic novel project featuring the unlikely hero Strepcard Zork (I'll post more teasers if/when it takes off).

And still debating whether to go to Novacon in Nottingham or SFContario in Toronto this November. Toronto wins, hands down, on location and I'm curious to hear toastmaster Robert J. Sawyer, but I find I'm getting more into the UK SF writing scene and Novacon is going to have a s**t-load of authors attending. Oh well, more when I decide.

My York Writers' Festival Experience

I was at the York Writers' Festival on Saturday. It's a three day event by I was only interested in the seminars on Saturday (and couldn't afford the entire event anyway).

Saturday was organized as 3 talks and 3 workshops (alternating) and I had my 2 one-on-one agent sessions amidst those.

The opening address by Katie Fford (distant relation of Jasper Fforde) was entertaining and added more data to my theory that 8-10 years seems to be about the modal time span for a hard-working, talented writer to get their first novel published (it took her 8 years). She also presented her ten tips to follow that would guarantee publication--summarized here as: write, write what you love, write in a fashion that works for you and don't get discouraged by any one opinion.

I was fortunate to hear a 'state of the sf/f/h market' presentation by well-repsected UK SF/F/H agent John Jarrold. It's his opinion that the sci-fi market is recovering fastest in the UK, with the US still lagging a bit under the 'only fantasy sells' mentality. Australia is somewhere between the two. And I managed a brief introduction, card grab after the session.

The other workshops I attended were on 'what writers should know about rights' and a kind of day-in-the-life-of-an-editor type talk with Oliver Munson from Blake Friedmann, and Zoe King from Darley Anderson. Both were interesting, but not a lot of new information. However, I did manage to catch Zoe King after her presentation and gave a crude pitch for a science anthology that she was tentatively interested in. I got the go-ahead to send her more details.

My two one-on-one sessions went as well as could be expected. Signing up late meant that anyone with any interest in sci-fi was already booked, but John Elek and Jo Unwin were both friendly and helpful none-the-less. As a great help, Jo gave me the author of a well respected book on editing/revision of novels, something I've been looking for for a while. For anyone interested, check Amazon under Sol Stein (apparently the book titles differ on either side of the ocean).

I also met Isabella White, an independent agent (again, non-sci-fi). Interestingly, both her and John Elek, the first two agents I met, are Canadian (from Toronto). It seemed a little strange going through the last ten years of world travels to come full circle and meet two Canadians at this event.

Anyway, overall I felt the event was worthwhile for me. It almost feels like the official marking of the next phase of my writing career--namely, properly finishing the work and getting it out there. And it taught me that agents are not ogres, most of them are quite friendly and helpful.

Selected Hugo 2010 Nominees

Hot off the press: the Hugo nominees were just announced here at Odyssey 2010. The winners will be voted on by Ausiecon 4 members until July 31 and will be announced during Aussiecon 4 (Sept 2-6).

The full data can be found on the Aussiecon 4 site, but I'll present a nominees from a few catagories here.

First, a few interesting/useful bits of info.

1) the twitter hashtag is #hugos
2) Americans gave most of the voting ballets, with just over half. Next most numerous were from Canada, then Australia-New Zealand, followed by UK, Europe, and the rest of the world.

John W Campbell, Best New SF Writer
- Saladin Ahmed
- Gail Carriger
- Felix Gilman
- Seanan McGuire
- Lezli Robyn

And now, some selected Hugo nominees:

Best Fanzine
- Argenta
- Banana Wings
- Challenger
- Drink Tank
- File 770
- Starship Sofa

Best Semiprozine
- Ansible
- Clarkesworld
- Interzone
- Locus
- Weird Tales

Best Dramatic Presentation - Short Form
- Doctor Who "The Next Doctor"
- Doctor Who "Planet of the Dead"
- Doctor Who "Waters of Mars"
- Dollhouse "Epitaph 1"
- FlashForward "No more good days"

Best Dramatic Presentation - Long Form
- Avatar
- District 9
- Moon
- Star Trek
- Up

Best Graphic Story
- Batman: Whatever happened to the caped crusader
- Captain Britain and MI13: Vol3 Vampire State
- Fables Vol 12: Dark Ages
- Girl Genius Vol 9: Agatha Heterodyne and the heirs of the storm
- Schlock Mercenary: The Longshoreman of the Apocalypse

Best Novel
- Boneshaker, Cherei Priest
- The City & The City, China Mieville
- Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd Century America, Robert Charles Wilson
- Palimpsest, Catherynne M. Valente
- Wake, Robert J. Sawyer
- The Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi

Interesting. Whereas, last year it seemed most of the Novel nominees were British, or at least living in the UK, this year belongs to the Americans with 4 authors from the US, 1 Canadian and 1 Brit.

That's all from me. There are a number of other catagories, but these are the ones I was most interested in. Anyway, now I'd better get down to some serious reading. After some sleep.

Anthologies - The Art of Compilation

I was delighted to see that the program for this year's Eastercon included a panel discussion on creating anthologies. The Panel featured Ian Whates: author, anthologist and founder of New Con Press; Ellen Datlow: American professional anthologist; Colin Harvey and Gary Couzens: writers and occassional anthologists.

There were a lot of discussions about submissions, pros and cons of open vs. invited vs. reprint (open is the most work, reprint is really fun and invited is often frustrating). It was interesting to hear that, even for anthologies, the big six publishers have a heirarchy of authors such that for every 'A' list author, you might need 2-3 B-list authors. The publishers also require 1/3 more invites than desired for publication due to the estimated number who won't end up producing a story.

It was also interesting to learn that anthologies are much more common and accepted in the US than they are in the UK. Apparently, it's very rare in the UK for a big publisher to accept a pitch for an anthology regardless of the idea. They just don't want to produce them and most British anthologies are done by small presses. This suggests to me that I should target the US market much more for selling.

Most positive for me, in this discussion, was when it came around to the layout. The two most experienced anthologists confirmed my own thoughts on layout, and the way I approached the layout for Assassins' Canon. i.e. generally the first and last are the strongest, with the longer, more challenging reads in the middle. With the added idea that the first story having the added ideas that it should set the expectations for the anthology, without being too heavy.

For Assassins' Canon, there were a number of stories I could have started with, but in the end I chose Ken Goldman's 'Fat Larry's Night with the Alligators' because it emboidied all the ideas above and, I felt, led nicely into the many directions and types of stories the anthology included. Likewise, Jason Frank's 'XDA Zai: The Wild Hunt' was a strong story that wrapped up the anthology in the same way--a nice mix of real and surreal. That said, there's not a single story I'm unhappy about including and I remain thrilled at the finished product. I can only hope future anthologies from Utililty Fog Press will be as good.

The Truth About Utopias

Eastercon (Odyssey 2010) has started off today and the first panel discussion I went to was titled: Utopia - how the concept has developed in sci-fi and philosophy.

As might be expected with such a title, much, if not all, the discussion centred around the usual things: what ideas have been presented in the past, what the panelists' own views are, is a utopia even possible. You know, wading through 50 minutes to find a few pellets of gold, like 1) on average, utopian communities that have been tried in the west last 18 months; 2) the most successful utopian communities have been religious oriented; 3) there's not even really a concensus on what a utopian society would fundamentally entail.

I believe these are the pellets of gold because they give the fundamental clues about the 'true' nature of a utopia. The secret...if anyone is wondering...is the same as it is for much of life. In short, a utopia is purely a frame of mind. If one believes they live in a utopia, then they do. Simple. This lends to the understanding of why religious groups are most successful with utopian societies--because both are about belief.

An ideal, physical utopia is logically impossible since everyone will have their own view of what a utopia is. Which suggests the way (dare I say, the ONLY way) to create a Utopia. One must make the population believe they are in a utopia. Classically, the could involve methods of propaganda or other brainwashing. Futuritically, it could involve more direct, technological means (subliminal messages in television shows...).

Typically, the discussions at such a panel has issues of class. i.e. partial utopias, a utopia for the upper class, while the lower classes toil their fingers to the bones. However, I don't believe this for the simple reason that the upper classes are no more happy than the lower classes. They have an easier life, but there is strong sociological evidence that such a life does not make one happier (indeed, if it did, why would such people continue striving for more...). Another observation to suggest that utopia is in the mind.

When looking at the existing and past cultures, my own belief is that the USA has come closest to achieving this utopian mindset--not only among their own people, but among people around the world. Despite all the problems of the country--attrocious health care, huge disparity of riches, rampant gun abuse, political corruption and abuses, imperialism, war mongering, resource hording--most residents, immigrants, and perhaps even foreigners, believe it is the best country in the world to live. This leads me to believe that the propaganda policies of the American government in the last century have been highly successful in creating the utopian mindset in their population. More evidence to suggest that any future utopia will, first and foremost, require the ability to manipulate or outright control the minds of its populace.

Frightening.

Odyssey 2010

I arrived at the Radisson Edwardian hotel in Heathrow (spitting distance from the airport) today for this years' eastercon-->Odyssey 2010. It doesn't officially start until 8pm Friday night, but there are events planned tomorrow during the day, some of which look to be quite interesting. I'll also have a chance to put up my artwork before most people arrive.

I was hoping to have six new pictures to put in the show this year, but things (mostly image size and framing) didn't go as planned. Of course, it's my fault for leaving it to the last minute (almost literally). So I will have 6 images showing, but one is from last year, with a new frame, and one will not be for sale. One that I had hoped to exhibit, Showdown, the first image in my Steampunk series, will have to wait for another con (or I may just put it online for sale). I do intend to open up an online store of popular images through my Artwanted.com profile, so watch this space for information.

In the meantime, I'm especially looking forward to listening to some well known authors. In addition the the guests of honour: Ian M. Banks, Alastair Reynolds and Liz Williams, I've also seen Paul Mcauley, Ken Mcleod, Mike Carey, Stephen Hunt and Chaz Brenchley on the program as panelists. Furthermore, I'm curious to hear the talks on 'how to submit your script to the BBC' and 'creating anthologies'. John Jarrold is also here, the sci-fi/fantasy agent that I'm most familiar with and will also be in York next week for the York Writers' Festival. Hopefully I'll get a chance to talk with him. And, of course, I'll once again be getting the opening of a novel critqued by the semi-pro London sci-fi group T-Party.

All in all, it's shaping up to be an interesting, enjoyable weekend.

Learn from the Masters

I've just been going through Alan Moore's (Watchmen, V for Vendetta, ...) graphic anthology Wild Worlds and I was truly struck by the difference in quality of storytelling between a master and the amateurs.

The anthology opens with a time loop story involving Spawn and the WildCATs which was beautifully developed (I won't say more here). But it was the second story that really brought home the difference in story quality for me. Essentially, it's a 'this could have been the beginning of the universe' story, told from the POV of some immortal characters at the end of one universe. I won't spoil it, but the story is developed beautifully so that we feel the dark, cold, aloneness at the end, but he also develops the science background enough to give you a conclusion that makes you think 'that's a cool idea, maybe...'.

I think this second story drove home the difference storytelling, the ability to develop a story from a rough idea, simply because at some point it seems every sci-fi writer has the thought to write a story about how the universe may have begun, and I've read my share of such submissions for the Utility Fog Press anthologies. But Alan Moore's blew them all away.

Take home message, if you're thinking of writing a 'beginning of the universe' story, read this one first.

Book Review: Celebration

In honour of 50 years of the British Science Fiction Association, Newcon Press published Celebration in 2008 (okay, I'm a bit behind on my reading). Edited by Ian Whates, it's author list includes some of the big names in British Sci-Fi (although there are notable absences) including Stephen Baxter, Ken MacLeod, Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Liz Williams, Brian Aldiss, Alastair Reynolds, and Ian R. MacLeod among others.

The first thing I expected from Celebration were stories of an up-beat nature. After all, I expected a celebration. In this regard, I was to be disappointed. The stories in celebration are, for the most part, visions of the future, but are almost exclusively dark. Once I accepted that idea, it wasn't difficult to sit back for the ride.

The anthology opens with one of the few non-futuristic stories, Jubiliee Plot, a Victorian, steampunkish tale about the importance of the rail system to the development of the UK by Stephen Baxter. It's an interesting story and well constructed yet somehow it took me a long time to get through. True Victorian/steampunk sci-fi is not my cup of tea, but I suspect, coming off unsuccessful attempts to finish his manifold series, that I'm just not enjoying Baxter's style. I do have one more of his books and that should let me decide one way or the other.

The first gem, for me, was The Killing Fields by Kim Lakin-Smith. A dystopian future where society has collapsed but the remnants of technology, or at least biotechnology, linger on. Human Scarecrows with inbuilt sonic weapons battle rogues of crop bandits and even those you save try to screw you. Think Mad Max meets Blade Runner. This is a beautifully written, dark tale with lots of action and I couldn't get enough.

The next beauty was The Crack Angel by Jon Courtenay Grimwood. While I've not read any of Grimwood's other work yet, and we didn't exactly hit it off in our brief meeting at Eastercon 2009, none-the less I enjoyed this story very much and it was exactly what I'd expected from researching his novels. Most of the story is a dark, first-person detective novel and I was wondering where the sci-fi was until quite close to the end (however, the monkey kept me believing the sci-fi would be there...).

For me, the final gem in the Celebration crown was Liz Williams' At Shadow Cope. This was more a fantasy than sci-fi, but I loved it anyway. It reads as a simple story of a well-placed sorcerer momentarily down on her luck who thus finds herself visiting an old and mystically hopeless colleague. While at his home she learns that that not all magical beings take obvious forms and that humans may sometimes be innocent by-standers in ancient feuds.

Other mentionables were: Peculiar Bone, Unimaginable Key by Brian Aldiss, an original take on the return of the messiah in a part of the book where there were a number of other less creative Christian stories; Alastair Reynold's Soiree an fun take on the singularity (and the post singularity galaxy). Unfortunately, I found it a little too predictable in key areas, which detracted somewhat from the enjoyment. And finally, The Man of the Strong Arm by Adam Roberts, which presents an interesting future of competing ideologies. A dominant totalitarian society with high tech and low moral against a free society with low tech but freedom and a knowledge of the past. My only disappointment here was that the story just seemed to get interesting when it ended. Too little background was developed for my taste.

All in all, Celebration is an enjoyable collection of modern SFFH, despite not living up to my interpretation of its name. The gems within more than make up for the few duds.