a-cubed.info

In three pieces of fiction involving heaven and hell (relatively) recently, I’ve come across a similar kind of concept: the idea of a place outside the influecen of heaven and hell. Is this a new meme bubbling up in fiction or is it just an old trope I’ve not recognised before? The three in question have very different versions of the idea, though:

• Mike Carey’s Lucifer series starts with Lucifer gaining an exist from God’s creation to “the void” beyond;
• Simon R. Green’s Nightside is explicitly created to be outside the power of both heaven and hell, although both angels and demons do visit it when the plot demands;
• Liz William’s The Shadow Pavilion introduces a new element to her classic Eastern mythology with Between the places in the cracks where inspiration comes from.

I’m part of the committee running HalCon next month in Omiya just North of Tokyo. It’s a (hopefully annual) bi-lingual Japanese/English SF convention. We’ve got two guests this year, Charlie Stross from the UK and Ooishi Masaru from Japan. As part of our con online presence we have a blog on which I posted the following piece about Charlie Stross, which I thought might interest people here as well.

Charlie’s Just This Guy I Know (more…)

I’ve always liked supernatural thrillers, although they were few and far between until recently. Starting with Laurell K. Hamilton (there were others writing such stuff before her but she seems to have been the first really high profile success – and yes, I’m ignoring Anne Rice here) and her Anita Blake series, there has been a growing sub-genre of urban gothic. It usually posits a re-emergence of some or all of the traditional ghosts and ghoulies into society, either completely openly or partly hidden.

However, being a fan of the supernatural thriller elements in this fiction, I’ve ended up reading a bunch of stuff which has a 180 page supernatural thriller buried inside a 500 page book filled out with kinky sex. I don’t mind the odd sex scene in my fiction. Sex is part of life and including it in fiction can round out the emotional content. However, I find that many of these books are descending into what I’ve decided to dub “Thrills and Moon”, where the sex becomes the principle story and the thriller element becomes a sideline. Here is a list of some of the books in the supernatural thriller category I’ve read, with an indication of how much Thrills and Moon element they contain (all in my opinion of course).

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Someone just linked to the Lolthulhu site from User Friendly comment board. I’d not come across this one before. Great fun.

For those of you coming to Worldcon, here’s the list of panels that I’m scheduled to be on.

Sat 1000 The Inevtiable Google Panel
Participants: Dr Andrew A ADAMS, Eileen GUNN, Tom GALLOWAY, Adam RAKUNAS
Love it or hate it, more than half of all net users search via Google. Is it really the end all and be all of all human knowledge? Computer knowledge? Our panelists have fun and try to predict where it will be in 2 year? 10 20? 100?

Fri 1400 The Transparent Society
Participants: Charles STROSS, Chris COOPER, David BRIN, Dr Andrew A ADAMS
David Brin wrote “The Transparent society”. In it he claims that current information technology kills privacy and that we must all adjust. Related concepts are scattered through his fiction. Is it possible to put social and legal limits on the processing of private information, now and in the future?

Sat 1600 Sex and Technology
Participants: David D LEVINE, Dr Andrew A ADAMS, Patricia MACEWEN
The automobile…..the movie……the Internet……then? How has modern technology affected sex? What lies ahead – virtual reality harems? Computer-enhanced marital aids? The orgasmatron? What can we look forward to? (and is this all a Good Thing?)

Potentially spoilers below.

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Autopope wrote a post that attracted over a hundred replies, trying to explain to believers what it’s like to be an unbeliever. I was one of the repliers, with something I’ve been meaning to post something about for a while.
My favourite book is “Lord of Light” by Roger Zelazny. This is for a number of reasons. One is his absolutely wonderful writing. Anyone who can write a line as simple as ” Yama poured more tea. Ratri ate another sweetmeat.” and have it perfectly convey an immensely complicated mood, was an utter genius.
Another of the reasons I love this book is that Zelazny encapsulated my feelings on religion so well:
“I fail to see what difference it makes whether it be supernatural or not…”
“Ah, but it makes a great deal of difference, you see. It is the difference between the unknown and the unknowable, between science and fantasy – it is a matter of essence. The four points of the compass be logic, knowledge, wisdom and the unknown. Some do bow in that final direction. Others advance upon it. To bow before the one is to lose sight of the three. I may submit to the unknown, but never to the unknowable. The man who bows in that final direction is either a saint or a fool, and I have no use for either.”

I’ve known Charlie Stross since about 1990. Steve Glover introduced us. When I first met him, I think he’d had one short story published in Interzone. He was struggling to become a fiction writer. A decade later and he’d made it into print numerous times in the major SF magazines (particularly Asimov’s) and finally got a book contract. I kept meaning to read some of his stuff, which we chatted about when we met at cons and elsewhere. When I went up to Edinburgh for the Computer Law World Conference last September, I met up with Charlie and his spouse Feorag. When I mentioned to Charlie that I really did intend to read some of his stuff real soon now (he’d sent me a copy of Accelerando in electronic form and asked me to see if I could spot any techno-gotchas, but I hadn’t had time) he very kindly supplied me with a full set of his books. I raced through them before Christmas and was mostly very impressed. His most recent SF (he also publishes a pseudo-fantasy series and a horror-detective series with different publishers) was Glasshouse, set in the same universe as Accelerando, which suffered as a novel from being a fix up of nine short stories in three groups of three. When it appeared on the short list for this year’s Hugo Award for Best Novel, I figured I’d actually buy a copy of one of his books, and I ordered a copy from Amazon. I just read it. Read on for a review.

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After a Nippon 2007 meeting today at the site in Yokohama, the staff attending split up into smaller groups and went to check out various restaurants. There are a lot of different restaurants in the Queens Square and Landmark Tower Malls near the Pacifico Yokohama conference centre. They’re not badly priced, either. Certainly I recommend the short walk across to the Queens Square (you go through that to get to the Landmark Tower Mall, about ten to fifteen minutes walk – longer for slowcoaches) rather than eating in the Intercontinental (small portions and extortionate prices).

So, along with Inoue Hiroaki-san, Inoue Tamie-san, Trevor Knudsen (what name for a Westerner living in Japan, try getting Japanese people to pronounce it from the written form), Rodrigo Juri and a couple of the other Japanese, we went in search of something that would fit me (picky beggar, mostly vegetarian) and Rodrigo (on a tight budget). Tamie-san suggested we try an okonomiyaki place (she remembered there was at least one in the Landmark Tower Mall).We went to the Yokohama Landmark Plaza Botejyu (okonomiyaki is food from the Osaka region and this is a chain that started in Osaka).

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Congratulations to Charlie Stross on getting another novel Hugo nominated. Eventually, maybe he’ll win “the big one”. Still, it is, as they say, an honour to be nominated.