Downloads

Ventus - Complete novel

I've made my first novel, Ventus, available as a free download, as well as excerpts from two of the Virga books. I am looking forward to putting up a number of short stories in the near future.

Complete novel: Ventus

To celebrate the August, 2007 publication of Queen of Candesce, I decided to re-release my first novel as an eBook. You can download it from this page. Ventus was first published by Tor Books in 2000, and and you can still buy it; to everyone who would just like to sample my work, I hope you enjoy this version.

I've released this book under a Creative Commons license, which means you can read it and distribute it freely, but not make derivative works or sell it.

Book Excerpts: Sun of Suns and Pirate Sun

I've made large tracts of these two Virga books available. If you want to find out what the Virga universe is all about, you can check it out here:

Major Foresight Project: Crisis in Zefra

In spring 2005, the Directorate of Land Strategic Concepts of National Defense Canada (that is to say, the army) hired me to write a dramatized future military scenario. The book-length work, Crisis in Zefra, was set in a mythical African city-state, about 20 years in the future, and concerned a group of Canadian peacekeepers who are trying to ready the city for its first democratic vote while fighting an insurgency. The project ran to 27,000 words and was published by the army as a bound paperback book.

If you'd like to read Crisis in Zefra, you can download it in PDF form.

Short Stories

I'll be adding new stories here periodically. First of all, you can try my Aurora-award nominated short story "Hopscotch." The year this was nominated, another of my stories was also nominated: "The Toy Mill," which I wrote with David Nickle. "The Toy Mill" won the award; but I've always been fond of "Hopscotch." Here it is, in its entirety excerpted from my collection The Engine of Recall.

Hopscotch

Personal tools

My Boskone Schedule

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conventions

What I'll be up to in Boston next weekend

These are preliminary items; I'm likely to have some stuff added for Sunday as well. Also, readings, signings, and Kaffeeklatsches are not yet scheduled so you can expect some action there too.

Frida 6pm Applied SF: Using SF in the Real World
Karl Schroeder
When he's not writing science fiction, Karl Schroeder is a consulting futurist for government and industry. Sounds like a perfect job? Hear all about it!

Satur 10am Building a Great Battle
James D. Macdonald, Tamora Pierce, Karl Schroeder
Whether it takes place in the expanse of space, an open field, or a dark street, what brings a great battle to life on the page? How must a writer manage pace and description so the reader gets a sense of the action?
Satur         12 noon       The Appeal of the Lawless Elite
Alexander Jablokov
Beth Meacham
Patrick Nielsen Hayden
Paul Park
Karl Schroeder
Editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden has said, "Much of the genre works by    appealing to our wish that the world s extra-legal violence be under the control of the kind of smart people we admire. The Second Foundation and the X-Men -- and, for that matter, the Scooby Gang    and the Laundry -- are all, to some extent, basically the Ku Klux Klan, except that the extrajudicial violence they carry out is (we re assured) merited and just." Discuss.
Satur         2pm          Who'd'a Thunk It? Unexpected Uses of Technology       Tobias Buckell
Chad Orzel
Karl Schroeder
Charles Stross   Numerous technologies wind up getting used for quite different    purposes than their originators expected. Consider dynamite, bubble wrap, speed trap radar, screensavers, the Internet's massive if not main use as a conduit for pornography, and laser pointer cat toys. What other example suggest themselves? Does this phenomenon make basic research more desirable, or less? Is it ever discussed in SF? Consider some of the great SFnal inventions (the hyperdrive, AIs, cyperspace, anti-gravity, boosterspice, positronic robots, personal force fields). Can you extrapolate some unexpected uses for them?
Sunday sometime (not fixed yet): Space War: How Would It Really Be Waged -- and Why?
(Pretty much what it says: Say we have a Galactic Empire or a hostile Mars or whatever. Take a realistic look at space warfare.)
Also Sunday Global Warming: The Realities
(The idea is not to debate whether or not it's real - of course it is -- but to take a scientific look at some of the more inflated claims and at some of the possible solutions.)