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Karl Schroeder

karl@kschroeder.com
literary agent: Donald Maass

Other blogs:  WorldChanging.com

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future projects

Jul 02, 2008

What he said

by karl — last modified Jan 28, 2008 07:52 AM

Yes, I'm part of the "Sekret Projekt" John Scalzi just revealed. It's going to blow your mind

Way over at the Whatever, John has made an announcement about a really fun project he dragged me into a couple months back.  It's true:  John, and Elizabeth Bear, and Jay Lake, and Tobias Buckell and I have been working together for several months to present you with a new near-future vision, one that's decidedly urban but calls into question what a city really is... and what the boundaries of sovereignty are in a future where some of the world's cities will have greater populations than the countries they are in. 

So, if the cyberpunks were all about corporate control, sticky technologies and software, we're all about sustainable communities, parallel economies and remapping reality with your GPS and your sleeping bag. It's the city alive, the city as beast and brother and increasingly, self-aware actor in the global political arena.

Or, as Shriekback sang in their song "Hymn to Local Gods" (a reference sure to date me as one of the old guys):

In the canals and the wastelands
Up in the spires, under the flyovers
Still you can see, with the right eyes,
The shining presence of the local gods
Stand in the silence you can hear them whisper
Hearing their laughter echo in the steel and stone

So leave a fire in the window
Pour the wine under the underpass
Let's all go down to the river
We'll go swimming with the local gods...

Apr 16, 2008

Interviewed by Parisian SF magazine

by karl — last modified Jan 28, 2008 07:52 AM

The interview's in English

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.