ArmadilloCon 2011: What You Should Have Read

A bunch of authors, editors, critics and booksellers discuss their science fiction, fantasy and horror picks of the year. Willie Siros usually presents his list of notable genre books that came out in the last year or two, but he forgot the list at home. So he recalled from memory five recent books that left the biggest impression to him. Here they are.

Willie's five most recommended genre books of the year

China Mieville "Embassy Town"

Greg Egan "Clockwork Rocket"

Robert Charles Wilson "Vortex"

Charles Stross "Rule 34"

Gene Wolf "Home Fires"

Willie's less memorable, but still good novels of the year

James Corey (Daniel Abraham's pen name) "Leviathan Wakes"

Greg Bear "Hull Zero Three"

Charles Stross "Scratch Monkey", his very first novel that has been unpublished until now. Willie Siros thinks it was good for Stross' career that his debut novel was "Singularity Sky", and not "Scratch Monkey". But now it has been published by NESFA. (I wonder, then, if this novel is only good in the "look how far this author has come!" sense.)

John Scalzi "Fuzzy Nation"

Rudy Rucker "Jim and the Flims"

Novels that inspired a discussion

Nnedi Okorafor "Who Fears Death"

Elizabeth Bear, Michelle Muenzler, and Willie Siros. More pictures from ArmadilloCon 2011 are in my photo gallery.

This book was highly praised by Michelle Muenzler and Martin Wagner. Martin recalled that one of its critics didn't think the future world in this novel was very well explained, at least not in a typical hard SF fan manner. Martin said that was because the world in which the narrator is living is not very clear to the people living in them. In the post-apocalyptic future Sudan, its inhabitants know only a little bit about our present day from some book, but most of the human history is lost to them. What is interesting is the narrator's personal journey. She is a product of weaponized rape, and an outcast in her society. This enables her to go on a journey she goes on. Martin characterized this book as an interesting hybrid that couples African mysticism with some very contemporary politics.

Willie Siros said that even though Nnedi Okorafor grew up America (she is of Nigerian origin), she has an interesting post-colonial view. He compared her to Ian McDonald, who is having "a lot of fun postulating future Brazil and India"

Hannu Rajaniemi "Quantum Thief"

Thomas M. (Martin) Wagner and Elizabeth Bear. More pictures from ArmadilloCon 2011 are in my photo gallery.

Martin Wagner wasn't quite disappointed by this book, but despite being a wonderful exercise in imagination, it didn't live up to the hype. Elizabeth Bear agreed: among other things, it is an uploaded brain book, a book on skinning reality, on being able to tune your reality in the "I don't like you, so you won't exist for me anymore" sense. But the author doesn't warm the water up for you, he throws you right in. Martin said he was processing the information so much that the story didn't hold any suspense for him. The premise of the book is like nothing he has ever seen: there's a city that walks around the surface of Mars. Time is currency there. After living for a while, its citizens become impersonal drones who work to support the walking city. Despite the imaginative setting, only one scene in the whole story has any heart on it: the hero brings a girl, the secondary protagonist, to a bar where she sings, because it's her hobby. Martin thinks this book had potential, but it will take the author 2-3 books to fully establish emotional connection with the reader.

Elizabeth Bear too said she didn't connect with that book. She felt distanced from the characters. It also does not testify to the author's writerly skills that when we meet a lesbian character for a first time, she is having sex. There are other ways to tell us she's a lesbian, says Elizabeth Bear.

John Scalzi "Fuzzy Nation"

Willie Siros counts this book in his "memorable, but not Top 5" category, but Martin Wagner was extremely impressed by it. Scalzi's take on that world was very faithful to H. Beam Piper (the author who originally thought up the fuzzies), but also uniquely his own. Martin liked a contemporary take on that particular story.

Mary Robinette Kowal "Shades of Milk and Honey" was another debut novel Willie was impressed with, and Martin liked it too. It's a Jane Austen pastiche.

Michelle Muenzler recommends

Darren Bradley "Noise"

Connie Willis "Blackout" and "All Clear" (a two-part novel, 2011 Hugo Award winner)

Michelle's most interesting fantasy books were all by Nightshade this year. "God's War" by Kameron Hurley has an interesting heroine who craps on everything, including herself. "No Hero" by Jonathan Wood is Lovecraft with the sense of humor. Michelle is a really big fan of Jonathan Woods voice. It's classic funny British, and if you ever talk to this author, you'll find he has the same kind of voice. You can imagine him in this book, talking with that voice.

Martha Wells "Cloud Roads". Though Michelle Muenzler strongly dislikes fantasy that has 5 million characters, "Cloud Roads" pulls it off. Every town has a new species. It has an ant culture mixed in with flying creatures. What Martha Wells did with different cultures is really fascinating.

Martin Wagner recommends

A whiteboard with the list of the recommended science fiction, fantasy and horror books of 2010-2011. Scott Lynch did the honors of writing it all down. More pictures from ArmadilloCon 2011 are in my photo gallery.

Joe Abercrombie "The Heroes". It's about how war teaches people who they are. Characters discover that what they wanted out of life wasn't necessarily what they thought. Heroism doesn't mean the same things to the same people. Abercrombie has an amazing way to convey battle scenes. Everything comes from the POV of the person in front of you. It's all filtered through the character you are relating to. It's like the Omaha battle scene in Saving Private Ryan. That's what makes it not just mindless violent fantasy writing.

Stina Leicht "Of Blood and Honey", a novel about a young man who finds out who he is in the times of the Troubles in Ireland. Fantasy elements are so subtly intervowen into this story that for hundreds of pages you don't realize you're reading fantasy. It's Martin's favorite fantasy debut this year.

Dan Abnett "Embedded", a military science fiction novel that appealed to Martin even though he's not a fan of that genre. The main character is a journalist, whose mind is going to piggyback on the mind of a grunt in a battlefield. The problem is, the soldier he's piggybacking on is immediately killed when he gets out in the field. So the journalist's awareness, his consciousness has to take over, and help to bring this soldier home, so he could tell the truth of what's going on out there. Martin described this book as trenchant satire about how politics and media come together to justify what we do at the time of war.

Under the radar book: "Enigmatic Pilot" by Kris Saknussem, whose style Martin compared to Mark Twain.

Elizabeth Bear recommends

Gemma Files "Book of Tongues", a very high grit fantasy western with hexslingers and ancient gods. The characters are terrible human beings who do terrible things for terrible reasons, but they really still care about each other. This keeps it from being a depressing book. And it has interesting worldbuilding.

Genevieve Valentine "Mechanique" is Elizabeth Bear's favorite debut is. It's a novel about a circus of people who had parts of themselves replaced by clocks and machines. Circus performers are competing for the role fo a ringmaster, who committed suicide. It's a wonderfully creepy, atmospheric, surreal little book. Willie Siros agrees that this one was on his list of favorite first novels, with not many lapses into first-time-writer'ness.

Disappointing Books

Martin said he has read two very, very, very long books by Patrick Rothfuss, and still waits for them to be about something. The last 1000-page book was about a kid "who goes here and does some stuff, and goes there and does some stuff, and gets into an argument with his girlfriend, does more stuff and goes home".

Brandon Sanderson "Way of Kings" was a bit disappointing too.

The book that takes a cake in this category (according to Martin) was "Hellhole" by Bryan Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson. It has magic aliens.

Willie Siros' most dispaointing book of the year was "Magician King" by Lev Grossman. To tell the truth, Willie was also critical of its predecessor "The Magicians". "You have a magic school, and magicians who graduate, but they don't do anything. They sit around with their trust funds and piddle. Students go off, have adventures, and then give up on anything difficult. What's the point of learning something if you don't do anything that's hard? I didn't like any characters," says Willie. "So I said, OK, I'll see what happens in his Narnia (called Fillory in the book -- E.), where they become a king of an alternate world. And that didn't go anywhere. They haven't learned anything how to survive as an adult."

>Willie was not impressed by George R. R. Martin's long awaited "Dance With Dragons" was very impressive either.

Audience recommends

Several members of the audience recommended these books:

Iain Banks "Surface Detail" has fabulous ideas, fabulous writing, says a guy in the audience.

Alyx Dellamonica "Indigo Springs".

Ian Macdonald "Dervish House" should have won a Hugo, says an audience member.

Pictures from Armadillocon 2011 are in my photo gallery.

Fantasy, Social Networking, and the Blogosphere: a World Fantasy Convention 2006 panel

Panelists: Elizabeth Bear, Matt Cardin, Lynn Flewelling (moderator), David Levine, Andrew Wheeler

What it was supposed to be about? Here's a preview of the panel as published in the program book. What are the benefits and drawbacks of community development and audience interaction in the new online environments? Does the ease and speed of feedback change the nature of the fantasy writer's process and work?

If there was one panel at the World Fantasy Convention that was a waste of time, this was it. A decade after the internet became mainstream, some of the panelists sounded as if they still lived in the mid-nineties era of wide-eyed wonder: OMG, there are people inside my computer!. To be fair, this tone was set by one particular panelist, who was 10-15 years older than everyone else on that panel, and a self-proclaimed Luddite. This person's comments were peppered by such exclamations as "On the other side of that wall, the screen of the computer, are total strangers, who are reading about my personal thoughts! People who read my blog now know where I live and what I do in the morning!" Hence, this person concludes: "I don't post anything that I wouldn't say out loud. And I don't mention the names of my children." Earth-shattering revelations, no less. :-)

Most other panelists seemed to have a much more comfortable relationship with technology. Unfortunately, the panel did not go beyond rehashing some old cliches about the internet. Is a persona one presents to the internet as real as the actual person? Are online activities more like acting, where you create the kind of persona you like? Etc. Is there anything left to say on this topic that hasn't been said since the 1990s? Judging from the panelists' comments, no.

To be fair, one panelist countered the usual perception that people's online faces are all fake. His online personality feels to him more authentic than his real-life personality, because his blog is the only place where he can fully express himself, where he can talk about things that truly interest him.

"I make my money by being a high school teacher. I deal with sophomores and juniors that tell me I use too many big words. My wife has no much use for books, reading, anything like that. She is very creative in a whole lots of ways, but we can't talk on this level. So these things I can't say in the social context, in the family context. So in my blog I say a lot of things that I can't say anywhere else, but they are authentic to me. "

This isn't unheard of; it was the "My wife has no much use for books, reading, anything like that" part, coming from a writer, that gave me a pause. :-)

Three or so writers in this group have blogs on LiveJournal: among them, Elizabeth Bear (LJ username "matociquala" and "elizabethbear", and David Levine (LJ username "davidlevine"). Some others had blogs on Blogger. They compared notes on different types of blogs. It was agreed that, to quote Andrew Wheeler, "LiveJournal is more community driven, it gets more comments, more comments on comments. The software it runs it is very friendly in that way. It's good for threading comments. Blogger is more linear. So you get fewer comments."

Elizabeth Bear. In LiveJournal, threading is very helpful to posing a quick question and getting answers, or making a 1-line comment on a movie you've just seen.

Elizabeth Bear further says: I'm on LiveJournal. I liked the way its communities work. You wind up in a comunity, there's a network. I use my LiveJournal as a resource, when I need an answer. I ask the most amazing questions. Like about penis tattoing. I got really good answers from professionals, who have done that kind of work. I'm, wow, this is a tool! So to speak. (Audience laughs.)

That's a undoubtedly correct observation, but what's the use of discussing it in a World Fantasy Convention, when there are much better forums out there for discussing online communications? I don't see much writerly insight in that.

While others were comparing different kinds of blogging software, the self-proclaimed Luddite went into a detailed comparison between blogs (and LiveJournal in particular) and newsgroups. This person thought of blogs as being a special kind of newsgroups.

"A difference between a newsgroup and LiveJournal is that in LiveJournal you are the host of the party. But a newsgroup is much more egalitarian: everybody speaks. I prefer the newsgroup: it's less work, and the onus is not on you to be interesting several times a week. I feel a lot more exposed in LiveJournal. LiveJournal is about advertising: you make yourself more available."

Hmm. To me, newsgroups and blogs are two very different animals, and I never thought of one in terms of the other. Perhaps this would be natural if my first familiarity with the internet was through newsgroups, and this form of participatory activity imprinted itself so firmly in my mind that I would see any kind of internet community as a kind-of-a newsgroup. But there are fundamental distinctions between the two, such as the one pointed out later by one of the panelists: "On Usenet SF groups you would not post a message "I had a bad day" but on LiveJournal you would. LJ is much more personal." Also, as Elizabeth Bear noted, "on Usenet, everytime you post something, somebody would jump on your throat and correct your punctuation. It's just not worth it." I very much agree. Somehow the comments on LJ rarely get as vicious as flame wars in newsgroups. It could be that people are much more polite when they comment on someone's post than they would be in newsgroups, because they are on the other person's "turf". To berate someone in their blog post comments would be similar to coming to their house and slugging them in the face. :-) In the newsgroups, though, we are all on equal turf.

Such distinctions may be of interest to sociologists, but again, I don't see how this topic is relevant to the World Fantasy Convention. Are these insights specific to fantasy or science fiction writers? Hardly. Well, it's just that, perhaps, you know the panelists are writers when they employ metaphors such as these:

Andrew Wheeler: In Blogger you feel like you are holding forth from a podium.

David Levine. LiveJournal is more like, everyone has a little table in their corner of the room, and we are passing notes...

Lynn Flewelling. Or throwing paper airplanes at each other.

By the way, the questions posed in the panel synopsis in the program book could have been answered in two sentences:

Does the ease and speed of feedback change the nature of the fantasy writer's process and work?

All the panelists gave an unequivocal "no". Or rather: the reader community influences what they write about in their blogs, but not their fiction writing.

Matt Cardin. I have a small dedicated audience who read my stuff. [...] When I started to blog this past summer, it picked up a lot of steam, there's a lot of comments flying back and forth. So the blog posts I'm writing to somebody. But my fiction [is something I'm writing for myself]. Blogging hasn't affected the way I write.

Andrew Wheeler. Sometimes you feel you do blogging for comments, or for links. You want to throw stuff out there and you want to see what people think about it. So you say things in a bigger, stronger way than you would otherwise.

None of the panelists think it's a good idea to tailor your fiction to what you perceive your blog readers want. Matt Cardin tells a story about Orson Scott Card started to respond to his readers' feedback in the newsgroups on the first two books in some of his series (not Ender), and quality of his next books plummeted.

Andrew Wheeler. One thing to remember is that the people who talk back are not usually representative of the larger readership. Knowing what the readers who are NOT talking to you actually want is fairly difficult.

Elizabeth Bear. If you start doing what everybody wants, you'll achieve mediocrity. There isn't a good book that hasn't bounced off at least one wall. If you are perfectly nice in your writing, you'll produce pabulum.

The writers seem to agree that while blogs don't actually help to sell books (Elizabeth Bear says she has sold no more than a couple of books through her blog), they are still a useful marketing tool.

David Levine. Having a blog is a lot like being at a convention. Having a face. I use my own name on my blog, and my own picture as my LiveJournal user icon...

(Elizabeth Bear. That's not Will Shakespeare?

David Levine. That's older, Jewish Shakespeare.)

David Levine. ... so that the editors would recognize my name and face from my blog. Just like at conventions, editors may think, he seems like a nice guy, he seems like he won't embarrass me if I send him on a book tour.

Elizabeth Bear and David Levine. See more pictures from this panel in my blog post on the "Fantasy, blogosphere and social networking" panel.