First off, an announcement. I have a story in a soon-to-be-released anthology.
Actually, it’s already out on Kindle, here in the US and in the UK.
(My original link was to the UK version, because that’s what the publisher in the UK sent me, and it didn’t occur to me to switch it out. Sorry about that!)
The general idea is that these are hard science near-future stories (set maybe 2050?) examining current problems / situations / policy questions. Maybe even some potential solutions. Here’s the Table of Contents.
I had ideas for all of them but only managed to get a pitch in for Learning & Education. That story hits on permaculture (which might not seem like a learning modality, but you can think of it as an extremely practical outdoor laboratory) and on the memory techniques that I’m always trying to get college students to adopt.
I did not check ahead of time to see how many talks Foer has given on the book. It’s several, which pretty much guarantees that students are not actually reading the book. Oops.
The commentaries are by volunteer academics, responding to the themes of the stories. Ours were Elizabeth Black, an expert in AI, and Danbee Kim, a neuroscientist who turned her PhD thesis into a graphic novel. I heard their more spontaneous spoken comments during the Zoom session, but I haven’t seen the offline written ones, and I’m curious how they’ll respond. I was deliberately pushing back against the idea that more tech is what we need.
I’ve pitched this formula — collaborations between SF authors and academics — multiple times in various research grant applications, with zero success. There are other examples, most notably through Arizona State’s Center for Science and the Imagination. This is a British publisher, though, and my first sale outside North America. I’m excited about it.
We will be holding a launch event sometime over the Easter weekend (29 - 31 March). This will be at the UK National Science Fiction convention - Eastercon - as well as in Spatial (VR and desktop virtual space). We don't know the exact date or time yet as we're waiting to hear from the convention. If you are going to be at Eastercon, please let us know so we can factor you into the launch.
Alas, I will not be at Eastercon, except maybe virtually if that’s an option. The time difference was kind of a barrier for our online collaborations (my fault, not theirs).
Local happenings
What the Hell Con was … small. Intimate, even. I estimated maybe 30 people the morning I was there, including the four vendors, two of whom I had interesting conversations with:
Marshall Lakes, an A&T alum with a bunch of self-published comics in the various Afro-futurist sub-genres of space opera and horror; and
Mike Moon, a Statie who currently lives in Burlington and runs an anime-inspired site called Catgirl Island.
I will hopefully do Q&As with both of them at some point in the future.
“Small” is not a criticism at all. Running cons at a consistently high level is hard, even in a non-COVID situation, and the inherently high turnover rate in student organizations makes it even harder. This is one of the reasons StellarCon was taken over by alumni and moved off campus to a hotel. The other reason is that once things get big, they tend to split into factions (alums vs undergrads, in that case). Marshall described a similar situation where the enormous 350-person anime club at A&T seems to have split into a purist group that wanted to watch in Japanese with subtitles and the trendier kids who wanted to watch in English. He said each club was planning its own convention now.
StellarCon planning continues behind the scenes for the weekend of April 6-7. More details as I have them. Also, I signed up to host a meetup for the blog Astral Codex Ten (ACX) on the 6th, during StellarCon, at the Old Town Draught House near campus. I figure there’s probably a good amount of overlap between those audiences.
Constellations
After I left WtH Con I ended up at etc.gso on Grove Street in Glenwood. They were hosting a two-person play called Constellations by some Brit named Nick Payne, who is apparently quite well known in the theater world, though not being much in that world, I had never heard of him. The troupe is called Doggie House, according to their Instagram, where I had to screenshot this photo because (being an old fart) I am not on Instagram.
This was one of those plays where we the audience are channel-surfing between parallel universes as one romantic / karmic relationship plays out in many different versions between beekeeper Roland and physics professor Marianne. There’s a lot going on. In different universes, the two characters play the karmic roles of seducer OR seducee, cheater OR cheatee. Marianne fairly consistently gets brain cancer, with different outcomes, and often contemplates an assisted suicide.
It was pretty heavy for me. My mother died in January, and this is the time of year when I think most about my older brother, who killed himself 13 years ago. It was also an hour and a half long. I feel like Rod Serling could have done the same thing in 44 minutes. All that repetition of dialogue between different universes eventually became too much of a good thing. The performances were good, though.
Midnight Suns
Oddly, two days before, I went to a hybrid lecture in the campus E-Sports Arena by Roger Travis, a classics professor from Connecticut, who has been making academic hay in video game studies for at least a dozen years now, to the point where there are named (funded?) collaborative projects:
Play the Past (2020)
Dr. Travis told us that the deck-building mechanics in Marvel’s Midnight Suns echoed the buildup and recombination of common trope phrases like “swift-footed Achilles” and “cunning Odysseus” into larger trope themes like getting stuck on an island that resonate harder the more times they are used. So the bards at Marvel were engaging in time-honored traditions of oral storytelling, in addition to fencing off and stealing Homer’s intellectual property.
Whatever floats your boat, I guess. Sorry, chariot of the sea.
Happy Equinox, y’all!
https://www.npr.org/2024/04/01/1240026582/dystopias-are-so-2020-meet-the-new-protopias-that-show-a-hopeful-future
And plays.
Creative Greensboro Presents ‘Evening of Short Plays No. 42’
https://www.greensboro-nc.gov/Home/Components/News/News/19205/