My second novel, Permanence, has been released in a beautiful mass-market edition.  The cover art is cool--it shows Rue's Ediacaran fossil pendant, which figures prominently in the story.

Amazon describes the novel like this:

La jeune Rue Cassels est née et a toujours vécu dans le Halo, cette région riche en naines brunes située à mi-chemin entre le Système solaire et les Mondes illuminés. Fuyant la tyrannie de son frère Jentry et l'ambiance interlope de la station d'exploitation cométaire Allemagne, elle s'empare d'une navette pour rejoindre Erythrion. Chemin faisant, elle fait valoir ses droits sur un objet stellaire non répertorié, ignorant que sa découverte aura des répercussions sans précédent. Avec ses combats spatiaux, ses énigmes extraterrestres plus anciennes que l'humanité et ses planètes exotiques décrites avec minutie, Permanence est un roman palpitant, s'inscrivant dans la mouvance du Nouveau Space Opera illustrée par des auteurs comme Iain M. Banks, Peter Hamilton ou Alastair Reynolds.

My first novel Ventus is also available in Folio SF mass-market format.

...So come on out!  I'm going to be reading from Pirate Sun, which will be released from Tor Books in August.  The location is the beautiful and historic Beaches Library branch of the Toronto Public Libraries.

Collective Intelligence expert, editor of WorldChanging Canada, and all-around polymath Mark Tovey has released a huge collection of essays optimistically entitled Collective Intelligence:  Creating a Prosperous World at Peace.  There's contributions from dozens of experts in this nascent field, as well as activists and stakeholders in a variety of different disciplines who are experimenting and refining the ideas behind CI.  To name just some of the people involved in this project:  Tom Atlee, Howard Rheingold, Jerome C. Glenn, Jaron Lanier, Thomas Malone, Pierre Levy, Thomas Homer-Dixon, Alex Steffen--and myself.  I contributed a short fiction piece that starts the whole collection off.  There's an afterward by former prime minister Rt. Hon. Paul Martin.

Collective Intelligence is not yet a mature field, either in terms of research or application.  This book accepts that, and asks what first steps are needed to get us on the road to understanding CI.  There's a healthy dose of skepticism--Jaron Lanier provides a good dollop--and I have my own reservations about the ultimate power of this idea; but it has to be explored, and CI may just turn out to be the key to the next step of human social evolution.  We owe it to ourselves and our children to find out, and this book starts the process off with a bang.

I've been thinking again about the idea that we need a web application that contrasts the daily content of our newsfeeds with aggregated statistics pertaining to the news's topics.  For instance, we're inundated with news items about violence and crime, while in fact most forms of crime have been dropping (at least in Canada) for several decades.  People perceive that the world is getting steadily worse, where in fact by most measures (such as democracy, literacy, childhood mortality etc.) globally things are getting better.  I should have proposed such an application at the recent SciBarCamp; in any case, it reminded me of the following blog entry I wrote into Age of Embodiment a couple of years back.

Embodied Economics

There's an interesting article by Craig Lambert at Harvard Magazine, called The Marketplace of Perceptions. Lambert examines the (relatively) new science of behavioral economics, which is predicated on the now-obvious idea that when making economic decisions, human beings are not rational actors. It turns out, in fact, that our decisions--even life-changing ones--are influenced by a host of completely non-rational quirks of human nature. Taking these quirks into account is essential for accurately modeling human economic activity.

In the context of this weblog, the idea of behavioral economics is simply another instance of theory-driven practices being replaced by empirically-derived ones. The assumption that humans act rationally in economic exchanges rests on a piece of 17th-century metaphysics: namely, the idea of the "rational mind" which maximizes benefits and minimizes risks. Humans were supposed to possess such minds (which were, of course, constantly battling against the irrational subconscious and evil desires for instant gratification). And you could misinterpret behavioral economics and related disciplines as being extensions of classical economics that take into account the presence of the irrational mind and human lusts. This would be a mistake.

At stake is actually the idea of the rational actor itself. As a metaphysical entity disconnected from the actual, physical world, the rational actor perpetuates the separation of those qualities we consider human from those we consider animalistic, base, and 'merely' physical. We may want that candy, but the rational mind, safe in its aloof tower, can command us not to take it.

What behavioral economists are showing is not that our rational decision-making processes are frequently interrupted or circumvented by irrational decisions, but that the rational actor doesn't exist. What do exist are multiple competing agendas inside each human being, some of which have been labeled as rational in the past, but none of which has primacy over the others.

Which doesn't mean we're doomed--quite the contrary. Knowing how we actually work when we make economic (and political) decisions is the first step to learning to actually control ourselves. In the case of economics, it starts with recognizing that regardless of how we style ourselves as the heirs of a rationalist tradition, we make decisions using a cognitive apparatus that was designed to maximize short-term benefits for hunter-gatherers.

The Harvard artitle talks about the implications this new science has for policy makers and people designing public programs. But what about the implications for the individual? After all, we're the ones who are going to be controlled to an increasingly accurate degree by those programs. We should have some ability to monitor the process.

This is where the open-source community can help. What we need is an application that uses a combination of software tools and the aggregation of human responses to analyze our inputs--the news stories, ads, and ideas that are presented to us, the information consumers, every day. Think of it as Slashdot-for-subliminal-advertising. It might work like this: I turn my browser to the CNN home page. The page pops up in the main pane of the window, but along the side of the browser, a list of biases is recorded--the assumptions and agendas that have been read off the home page by the app. As well as a list of probable responses people will have (in terms of buying patterns or voting patterns, say) to the various major news items.

It's time our unconscious minds started reporting to us in terms that our conscious minds can use. As behavioral economics progresses, I hope people in the online community will keep up--and develop tools that let the individual participate in the process of controlling his or herself.

Tor has told me that they're going to release the Virga books in audiobook format (through MacMillan's audio division) on an aggressive schedule.  I don't have exact release dates, but here's the general timing--and it's quite tight:

1. Sun of Suns will be out in June
2. Queen of Candesce will be released in July
3. Pirate Sun will be out in August, essentially simultaneously with the release of the print version.
   

Today Tor Books and I are releasing a free (and DRM-free) ebook version of my novel Sun of Suns.  The only "cost" is that you have to register as a member at Tor's soon-to-be-launched cool new science fiction portal, located (not coincidentally) at tor.com.

Tor is releasing Sun of Suns in three formats:  PDF, HTML, and MobiPocket ebook format.

It's really a no-brainer.  Head on over and pick up your copy today!

The continuing education people at the University of Toronto have invited me in to spend a week with anybody who wants to improve their science fiction writing.  (Caveat:  it's the process and your hard work that'll improve you, not any genius on my part.)  If you're in the GTA in July and can come, I'd love to see you!

You can find out more information on the course at the University of Toronto Continuing Education website.  --Actually, forget that, I'll just drop their page right in here:

SCS 1823 Summer Writing School: Science Fiction

Course Details

Science Fiction explores the effects of technological change on social systems and on individuals. Get instruction and advice on plot, character and world-building, how to research SF, and how to market your work.

Please submit a piece (or excerpt) you wish to workshop (maximum 20 pages, double-spaced) by June 23: scs.writing@utoronto.ca 

Creative Writing

Sections

	SCS 1823 - 002	Status:  Available
	Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu, Fri 10:00AM - 4:00PM 7 Jul 2008 to 11 Jul 2008 Number of Sessions: 5 Tuition:   $599.00	Delivery Method: IN-CLASS Campus: St. George Campus Instructors: Karl Schroeder, Writer

I've known this was coming for months, but couldn't talk about it.  Now my publisher, Tor, has revealed that Sun of Suns, my rollicking postmodern space-opera, will be next week's free ebook download from Tor.com.  Want a copy?  Then head on over to the new site and register.  It's free, and if you act now, you'll also gain access to a couple of other free ebooks.

Believe me, it'll be worth it to join the new site.  Tor isn't just pasting new art on an old site, here; they're opening up their entire operation.  The new tor.com will be a participatory playground for fans, thoughtful readers, and aspiring writers. It'll also have original art and stories, and stuff I still can't talk about.

The excellent French online magazine ActuSF has published an interview with me.  They wanted to know about Ventus and Permanence and some of the ideas I explored in them.  It was refreshing for me to talk about those books, because as the current Virga quartet winds to its conclusion (not that there won't be further books set there, by the way!) I find my interests and attention wandering back to the issues I explored in my first three novels.  I'm hugely interested in present developments in cognitive science, and am now thinking about how the vast array of settings and tech I developed for Ventus and Lady of Mazes might be used to support a novel about cogsci.  --Relax, I'm just daydreaming, for now.

I just found out that Book II of my Virga series, Queen of Candesce, is on the preliminary ballot for the 2008 Locus Award!  (I should have known this--aren't all the Locus Recommended Reading titles on the ballot?)  In any case, I'm quite proud of the company this puts Queen in, next to books by Brian Aldiss, William Gibson, Joe Haldeman, and Charlie Stross.  The downside to being on such a prestigious list is that my chances of winning are miniscule, but the ballot is of the Australian Rules type, where you can choose your top five works in order of preference.  (The ballots hold a kind of run-off election against each other that allows a candidate who's nobody's first choice, but everybody's second choice, to win.)  So, who knows, maybe Queen will be everybody's second-favourite book of last year!  (Venera would fall to the ground and gnash her teeth at that thought.)

One oddity of the ballot is that the web page makes it look like you have to be a Locus subscriber to vote.  You don't.  Anybody can vote, you just have to include some identifying contact information, which Locus will keep confidential.

There are a lot of categories for this award, including short story, novelette, best art book etc.  So zip on over and vote; it's painless and at the very least will let you settle in your own mind what your favourite works were last year.

There's some recent speculation on the web about the puzzling problem of why we can't seem to spot any alien civilizations.  The latest buzz surrounds the idea of spotting Dyson spheres in our galaxy or elsewhere.  Bruce Dorminey sparked the discussion with a piece on physicsworld.com, and others such as Paul Gilster over at Centauri Dreams have picked up on it.

I've written about the Fermi paradox before; in fact, my novel Permanence offered a new solution to the problem.  Astrophysicist Milan Cirkovic wrote a nice analysis of the ideas in that book for JBIS, and he and I have corresponded ever since. 

As part of our recent discussions, I wrote him a little note about the logic behind such monstrous engineering projects as the "Kardashev-II civilization," where a species decides to capture all the energy radiated by its sun, generally by building a giant Dyson sphere around it.  I think the idea's a perfect example of homocentrism, or more exactly the kind of techno-centrism that assumes that future civilizations will orient themselves around the same central issue as 20th century humanity (in this case energy use).  Here's my off-the-cuff comments to Milan about energy efficiency as it relates to the visibility of spacefaring civilizations:

Notes to Milan

I’ve been doing  a lot of consulting/writing about “green” technologies lately, and one idea that comes up a lot is the concept of ecosystem services.  An ecosystem service is something you get for free from nature, whose value can be directly calculated by estimating what it would cost for us to provide the service ourselves.  For instance, water treatment:  recently a greenbelt area was declared around Toronto, basically a crescent-shaped region where real estate and industrial development is banned.  A key reason for doing this was the discovery that these forested lands filter and treat the entire aquifer for the Toronto region.  If they were developed, much of the fresh water in the region would dry up.  We’d then have to import/produce fresh water ourselves, and the cost of doing that can be directly calculated, and compared to the financial benefits of developing the land.  It turns out that the land, left alone, provides a set of essential services more cheaply than we can provide them technologically.

Now in the realm of information processing, it turns out to be cheaper for many organisms to offload calculations into the natural world; cockroaches use a clever mechanism that’s directly tied in to air movement and shadow angle to directly cause leg movement (they scurry away when something swings at them).  This mechanism essentially bypasses the nervous system because that’s too slow.  A partial program is in general any algorithm where key steps in the algorithm are offloaded in this manner:  the classic example is (for Americans) how do you catch a pop-fly in baseball?  AI researchers used to think that it required a sophisticated internal model and some nasty differential equations solved by the nervous system; in fact, runners catch a ball by running backward while keeping the ball at a fixed angle with respect to the horizon.  This combination of factors substitutes successfully for the calculation.

 Combining these two ideas, of ecosystem services and partial programs, we can propose an economic argument for the invisibility of advanced civilizations.  A settlement that uses solely ecosystem services is called a ‘zero footprint’ settlement (another word for sustainable).  Zero-footprint means environmentally neutral; it also means invisible to the mechanisms we usually use to detect the presence of technological activity (because our means for doing so generally involve detecting the waste products of systems running against or in parallel to natural processes).  In addition, a civilization that offloads as much of its data processing as possible into natural processes in the physical world, through partial programs, is more energy-efficient than one that builds "computronium" to do its thinking, and probably calculates faster (because the energy required by an algorithmic process and the speed with which it's executed are related).  The more such processes are substituted by integration with the natural world, the harder it will be for us to see the operations of that civilization from interstellar distances.  In fact, I would argue that a civilization that integrates efficiently with its environment on these two levels will be invisible by definition. 

A corollary to this is that colonizing other planets means moving into environments that provide few or no ecosystem services.  This implies that a spacefaring civilization is visible only in those places that do not provide such services; between its worlds, in other words.  Such a civilization’s visibility is then tied to its ability to directly adapt itself to alien environments including the environment of outer space itself.

It's rained here for the first time in a couple of years--well, somewhat more recently for Kalbarri itself, but there's some locales on the drive up that hadn't seen anything in about that long.  Dust storms swirled about the car, kicked up by the distant but felt presence of Pancho.  We arrived in Kalbarri in time for rain and winds that bent the palm trees over.   Two days later, the wind is still nasty, but we're planning some flights over Shark Bay and elsewhere, optimistic that things will calm down by the weekend.

I'm writing--working away on The Sunless Countries plus a surprise easter egg that Tor dropped in my lap on friday (hint:  I'm not happy).  Janice and Paige are seeing the sights and just generally kicking back. 

Oh yeah, the spiders.  Haven't seen one quite that big yet, but I'm assured they do exist.  Huge golden orb spiders spin their webs in the evening and drop them down across porch awnings; places you were safe to walk an hour before suddenly have huge webs and bigger-than-thumb-sized spiders that go straight into your face.  That's fine, though; it's the flies that are driving us all crazy.

Australian flies are small, but they're insane.  They attack you in droves the instant you step outside and try to climb into your ears and nose.  Many locals here wear beekeeper hats just to walk down the street (no, I'm not kidding).  I'd be lying if I said you get used to them, but primal instincts come into play quite quickly, and you end up walking around waving your hand reflexively in front of your face.  Nobody notices.

Other than that, it's paradise--about 30 C right now and gorgeous air.

One corner of Rainbow Jungle, where Janice and I were married in 2001.

Janice and I got married in this sleepy little seaside resort town seven years ago.  It's only fitting that we should bring Paige there now to see what's changed, and visit the places from our wedding and honeymoon. 

Kalbarri's about an hour up the coast from Geraldton, WA.  It's surrounded on three sides by a conservation area, with the ocean on the other front.  During the summer it can be intolerably hot here--45 C--but right now, in the fall, it's beautiful.

Being smack on the Indian Ocean, Kalbarri's got great vistas.  Above is just one of a number of points along the coast, just south of town, where you can stand and look out over the sea from high overhead. 

This is a view from the hotel we stayed at when we got married.  Just down the street is the bay, with a long sandbar that stretches out across it; you can walk out onto this and watch the sunset, which (since it rarely rains this time of year) pretty much always looks like this:

The Dutch used to come roaring along this lattitude looking for Jakarta, and regularly smacked into the Australian coast without warning; hence the whole area is crowded with shipwrecks.  Local museums (Geraldton has a fine one) are packed with shipwreck items, including chests and coins.

This is a view of the Zuytdorp Cliffs, named after one of those famous wrecks.  The cliffs go on for at least a hundred miles, with nothing but a couple of tiny sheep stations backing them up.  You can fly from Kalbarri along these cliffs, across the aptly named Shark Bay, and swim with the dolphins at a place called Monkey Mia.

Yeah... I'm having fun.  And the news that I've just sold audio rights to the Virga books makes me feel like I'm working, too!  (Actually, I am--I brought my laptop.)

That's all for now... more soon!

Tor just informed me that MacMillan has bought the audio rights to the first three Virga books:  Sun of Suns, Queen of Candesce, and Pirate Sun.  This is fantastic news!  I'm looking forward to listening to them myself, just to get a sense of how my words and sentences roll and what sort of music they have when read by someone else.

I hope they decide to pick up the fourth contracted book, The Sunless Countries; but the first three constitute one complete plot arc--a trilogy, if you will, although not all questions raised in them are answered--and TSC is more of a stand-alone.  We shall see.  Meanwhile, I couldn't be happier.

Yesterday I was interviewed by Grant Stone, who does a nationally-syndicated radio show called Faster Than Light here in Australia.  We talked about my work, what it's like for an SF writer having a Mennonite background, and my connection to Australia (we got married there).  The interview was done over the phone, even as a local couple we hadn't seen for seven years was coming in the front door.  Embarrassingly, I had to hide in the bedroom to do the interview while Janice and her mother and aunt took care of the social essentials.

It all worked out, and yesterday Janice and Paige went to meet seals and penguins while I stayed at the hotel to catch up on my writing.  Today, we're in Geraldton and on our way to Kalbarri for a week.  Yay!  I'm really looking forward to that; Kalbarri is where we tied the knot, and it'll be great showing Paige all the places around there that we discovered together the first time. 

So I finally got to meet Sean Williams; he and I were on a couple of panels yesterday and today with Ken MacLeod, Robin Pen and Jonathon Strahan, talking about space opera (go figure!).  Sean and I went for lunch together today (which is tomorrow for you reading this in North America) at a very nice Indian restaurant on the corner, and talked shop happily until my panel at 2:00 when I did a very interesting panel on "Painting the Future Green" with Zara Baxter, Margaret Dunlop, and Tiki, whose last name I didn't catch, a media analyst from the east coast.

I'd be uploading loads of photos to add to this post, except that my laptop has decided not to recognize SD cards, so I have to find a workaround to get them off my camera.

While we're waiting on that little technical glitch, here's a couple of previously uploaded shots:  the entrance to King's Park, in downtown Perth, and a glorious sunrise taken in the countryside northeast of Geraldton.

Meanwhile, back in Canada, there's been heavy blogging activity around SciBarCamp.  The buzz is building that we might do another, and people who were mildly interested before are now keenly curious.  This was exactly the outcome we were hoping for.

Ken MacLeod and I were talking about places to see in Western Australia.  There's plenty I haven't seen here; I've never been to the Margaret River caves, for instance.  I have seen the Pinnacles, however; and I'd recommend it to anyone with an interest in the bizarre and exotic.

The Dutch sailors who first spotted this area from the ocean thought it must be the ruins of a city.  Up close, it's even stranger:  miles of sandy desert dotted with grotesque standing stones, like thousands of druidic henges; so many that you can wander out among them and easily become lost.

The Pinnacles average about two meters in height, which adds to the strangeness; you're in a forest of stone statues your own height.  They've been worn by the wind and sand, some into almost-human shapes.  It must be fantastic to be out here at night, especially during a full moon.

You can take a tour bus from downtown Perth, visit the Pinnacles, and be back by supper.  Very civilized--but luckily Perth itself is remote.  What I mean is that I hope the Pinnacles doesn't become too easy to get to.  There are many such places in Western Australia that are only now being opened up to tourism.  Right now, you can practically have them to yourself.  It's sad to think that this might change, because I'd hate to have to experience wondrous regions such as the Pinnacles from behind a fence, as you now have to do at Stonehenge.

The first time we went to Perth, seven years ago, we took a packed 747 and the flight was hellish.  By the end the toilets were backed up, I was crawling under the seats to try to sleep, we'd run out of food and there was nothing to do.  This time, the plane was a brand-new 777 with little movie screens in the seat-backs, we were fed at perfectly strategic times, the toilets were clean, and Paige was very well behaved.  I wasn't even sore when we finally arrived in Perth.

This was good, because I was supposed to be in front of people, doing panels with Ken MacLeod and others, less than 24 hours after we'd arrived.  Despite the 13-hour time difference between Toronto and Perth, this has turned out not to be a problem.

Swancon's being held at the All Seasons Hotel, not the one we're staying at, but about a mile distant.  I sauntered over from our hotel about an hour before my first panel, through neighbourhoods that seem to have been utterly transformed since 2001.  Downtown Perth's quite familiar to us, but last time  parts of it had a rough look to them.  These parts seem to have been bulldozed and replaced by new and upscale establishments; downtown is being gentrified. 

The Good Friday morning was bright and warm (19 C overnight, warming up to 33 by the afternoon), with just a few people about; I passed through a gorgeous little park with gigantic, sprawling tropical trees and a dance troupe warming up on the lawn; past late-night clubs with their doors open to air out in the morning light; past 100-year-old stone buildings with wrap-around balconies, reminiscent of New Orleans.

Then it was time to talk about the Singularity with Ken MacLeod and Dirk Flintheart, and then the obsolescence of the "brain is computer" paradigm with  Ken and David Cake.  I sort of breezed through these despite being addled from lack of sleep; the real challenge was talking, without notes, for an hour by myself on the subject of foresight studies vs. traditional futurism.  This talk was scheduled for 4:00 p.m., which is 3:00 a.m. Toronto time.  I had a really great time and chatting with the attentive and interested audience for an hour was easy.

Tomorrow should be interesting.  Either it all catches up to me and I collapse into a drooling mass of inappropriately cold-weather-oriented clothing; or I'll be fully adjusted to the time change and raring to go.  I'll let you know.

I'll be attending Swancon later this week.  You can find a programme here (although, it doesn't have names on it and I'm not entirely clear on which panels I'll be on).

Our itinerary takes us first to Perth for the convention, then up to Kalbarri for a week and then outside Geraldton.  If you'd like, you can check out some of these locations in Google Earth.  I will be posting pix as I can, though for some of the time I will be off the grid entirely.

This is an important point:  you may not be able to get in touch with me.  Use email, certainly, but don't be surprised if even that doesn't work, or is delayed.  The people who're staying at our house will be monitoring the phone, and we'll be giving our Aussie contact info to close friends and family; so if it's urgent you can find me.  If even email doesn't work, try posting a reply to this message.  I'll be checking the site whenever I can.

And yes, I'm taking the laptop, and working on The Sunless Countries while we're there.

The entire weekend went off with very few hitches--the worst being a bit of schedule crunch on Saturday, but nothing that actually stopped people from presenting.  I took a few more photos, but at this point there's a lot of other people who had much better cameras than my phone, and who were much better photographers; so I'll just point you to the Flickr page where many of the pix have been collected.

If you'd like more detail about what we discussed, you can drop by the SciBarCamp website and look at the program schedules.  We've encouraged people to blog about the event and to tag their entries with SciBarCamp, so you can track down a lot more about it at sites like technorati.

I'd like to thank everybody who had faith in us and came.  I'd also especially like to thank the other organizers, Jen Dodd, Michael Nielsen, Eva Amsen, Lee Smolin, and Jamie McQuay.  Jen and Michael were the instigators and they, Eva and Jamie did most of the work; I was just along for the ride, really.  Jen and Jamie in particular spent their own money to make it all happen, and deserve special mention for it.

We've talked about whether we're doing another SciBarCamp; there's no reason why not, it's a scheduling issue more than anything.  I hope the meme spreads, and that it becomes a regular in Toronto and beyond.