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.