Here's an image that's gotten wide exposure in the past week or so: In their article The network of global corporate control, Vitali et al. mapped out the global network of ownership that constitutes what some would call the Oligarchy. This, in other words, is a chart of the famous 1% who control 50% of the world's wealth.  

It's an interesting chart, because it shows several different kinds of information. The size of the dots represents companies' operating revenue; colour indicates their influence on the network. The large red dots are the companies that run the world.

This might seem a little abstract, so here's a zoom-in that shows how the network works: 

Now what's interesting to me here is not the usual paranoid recognition that a very small number of entities control the world; 'control' implies they can actually steer the course of events, which is not the case. They have disproportionate influence, and that's not a good thing; but control? Nobody's actually in control.

No, what's interesting and disturbing to me is the level of interconnection itself. In my 2005 novel Lady of Mazes I introduced a future world where interconnections on all levels of the economy and society were carefully pruned by the all-powerful anecliptics. These non-human powers worked tirelessly to prevent critical states of interconnection, where a tiny event at one point in the network can suddenly cascade through the whole thing and realign everything.

(These are sometimes called sandpile models, because they reflect the same physics as sandpiles: you can drop grains of sand one at a time onto the pile, and most of the time, nothing will happen. The pile just grows. Then all of a sudden, you drop one grain and the whole pile collapses. Why does this happen? It has to do with self-organized criticality.)

When the 2008 economic meltdown happened I felt like Cassandra, because you could watch the collapse of the over-connected financial network in real-time. All kinds of causes have been advanced for the collapse, but really, any specific cause for the failure of a given node of the network is secondary to the fact that the failures propagated.  This is because the network was over-connected and had reached a critical state; the same thing is happening again.

So, my interest in this model is not because it shows that a small set of companies 'run the world;' it's because it shows that we live in what Brian Cantwell Smith calls a frictionless 'gearworld' where turning any gear, no matter how small, anywhere in the world, may cause everything else to revolve.

In Lady of Mazes networking limits called 'firebreaks' were used to prevent interconnections reaching a critical state, and influences from spreading too far. In a New Scientist article on the above-cited study, George Sugihara of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, a complex systems expert, is said to have advised a tax on interconnectivity for corporations. That would be a kind of firebreak in the Lady of Mazes sense. We need something like this now, not just to prevent a consolidation of power  but to prevent the vulnerable collapse of a sandpile-model of the world economy.

Tor has unveiled the cover art for my next Virga novel, Ashes of Candesce, and this time, Stephan Martiniere has outdone himself.  I've always been delighted with his covers--as a matter of fact, not two hours ago I was in a framing store arranging to have the Lady of Mazes cover piece framed--but THIS!  This is by far the most gorgeous cover he's done for one of my books.  But what makes it such a personal and emotionally moving experience for me is that, as with his image for Queen of Candesce, this is a particular, specific scene from the book that he's represented here--and he's captured my vision perfectly.  I got all choked up when I saw it; and then I danced around in delight for ten minutes.

And who exactly is that, standing at the top of the stairs?  And where is she?  You've met her before, and very recently, in the series.  The light that floods the scene is not that of Candesce, the sun of suns, nor is it the light of any sun we've yet seen in these books--but the sun that's casting that light is very important to one of our main characters. --And that's all I'll say about it for now.

I could not be happier.  Thank you, Stephan, for this stellar piece of art, and thanks, Tor, for believing in this series.

Check it out.  Not that I'm likely to accessorize with this one myself, but it's nice to know it exists.

I basically wrote Lady of Mazes for Europe.  I thought that of all people, Europeans would understand what I was getting at when I talked about a world of customizable realities and a technology of cultural preservation.  Canadians too, I hasten to add; I was lamenting aloud about the death of the counterculture to a Quebecois friend of mine, and he said, "The counterculture isn't dead.  It's other countries."  (This statement will make perfect sense to the Quebecois, and to Europeans and pretty well anybody in the world--except Anglos and particularly mainstream Americans--because everywhere in the world must constantly compare their own cultural productions to those of America.  It's not a bad thing, necessarily; it's just something we're all aware of all the time.)

So I'm delighted that thanks to the staff at the Factory of Ideas, and the hard work of my translator, Virginia Sanmartín López, Lady of Mazes is now available in Spanish, from a variety of booksellers including casadellibro.com and IberLibro.com.  It's also getting good reviews--for instance this one in Literatura Prospectiva and this one by LiteRatos.  (Both reviews acknowledge that it's a difficult read, and that, of course, was the case for many people with the English edition, too.  I refused to dumb down this book.)

One thing that particularly delights me, for no reason, is that the round-trip translation through Google of Lady of Mazes, to La Senora de los Laberintos and back to English, is The Lady of the Labyrinth.  Which, perhaps even better than my original, indicates just who it is I'm alluding to here. 

Over at Tor.com, Jo Walton speaks about her recent discovery of my first novel, Ventus.  It's a nice review and a good introduction to some of the ideas in the book.  Ventus, mind, is the sequel-of-sorts to Lady of Mazes, and moreover is available from this website as a free ebook if you're interested in checking out my work with no commitment cost.  If you're at all interested, check out Jo's review, then come back and grab a copy of the novel.

Jo Walton has some very kind words to say about Lady of Mazes; it's the sort of review I could have hoped for more of when the book first came out.  Actually, the public reception to this novel perfectly encapsulates my career:  rave reviews, nobody buying.  Jo talks about how much she enjoyed the novel, and how surprised she was that it wasn't being talked about everywhere.  I wasn't surprised--more like, resigned. 

Somebody recently told me, "science fiction can only look in one direction at a time, and right now, that direction is Charlie Stross."  (Who is, I hasten to add, eminently worthy of our regard.)  But it does seem to be the case that "there can be only one" in SF, or at least it seems that way when it comes to SF novels in any given year.  I'm currently enjoying the irony of having thousands of people become aware of my work through the free download version of Ventus--for which I receive nothing, of course--rather than, say, through my current, critically-acclaimed, award-nominated series.  I've given up trying to figure out why this sort of thing happens, but I know I'm far from alone--check out Kaythryn Cramer's list of 100+ people who have never won a Hugo, for instance (it's astonishing who's on it).

Anyway, my warm regards and thanks to Jo for talking about the book that is, in many ways, my favourite--Lady of Mazes was certainly the more challenging and rewarding project I've ever undertaken, and of all my characters Livia Kodaly is closest to my heart.