Check out Mike Brotherton’s list of Ten Issues for Hard Science Fiction, complete with handy links.

There are a number of issues that continue to keep coming up in hard science fiction, or any science fiction trying to get the facts right. I just helped my collaborator here a few days ago answer a reporter’s questions on one of these (humans expelled into space without space suits). These things should always be right. There’s no excuse in this day and age. We’ll start with the space expulsion.

Biology in Science Fiction did a write-up about some of my SF stories and the biology contained therein. That was a really nice thing.

But not half as nice as discovering that there’s a blog devoted to biology in SF. How cool is that?

(Thanks to Jeremy Tolbert for pointing it out¹ )

1. Yes, I have google alerts, but he got there first. [↩]

I was just reading an article about how NASA plans to return astronauts to the moon by 2020 and thinking that it was forever from now. Only, it’s like twelve years, which, as government agencies go is practically tomorrow.

It’s just that after eight years I’m still not used to living in the twenty-first century. There’s no jetpack, but all the science-fiction dates are just around the corner. I mean, how many stories have you read where something is set in 2024 or 2041. They sound really far away and all furturistic, except they really aren’t.

At last year’s Readercon I wound up on a panel talking about near-term SF and one of the things I said was that I counted stories as near-term right up through 2070 because there’s a fair chance that I will still be alive then. My grandmother is nearly 103 and still lives alone, so I figure 2070 ought not to be a problem for me.

Although we talk about how much has changed in the last hundred years, look at how much hasn’t. Sure there’s tech that a teenager in 1920 would not believe possible, but the structure of society hasn’t shifted out of recognizable forms. Shifted, yes, but most people still live in the same family structure as one hundred years ago. Women worked then, but not as often as their husbands.

It’s making me understand the whole mundane SF movement a little more. It’s not that I have less fascination with deep space colonies, it’s just realizing that it’s much, much farther away than I’d like to think it is.

So, I’m re-examining my SF now, taking trends from the past and trying to project them from today forward instead of just thinking “wouldn’t it be cool if?” I mean, what was the last SF story you saw that had any form of social networking? Darn few of them, aren’t there. They exist, but that part of our present doesn’t show up as often in the future as FTL.

Can you imagine a murder-mystery where the serial killer Twitters?

The editor at IGMS asked me to pass this along to you. I think highly of him, and he’s offering free fiction. How could I say no?

When you have something great, you want everyone to know. So you tell people about it. You share it. You pass it along to friends everywhere. Well, that’s what we’re doing with InterGalactic Medicine Show. We want to make sure everyone has had a chance to check out what we’re doing, so we’re offering up a sampling of our stories – for free.

During the month of February we are going to make one story from each of our first four issues available at no charge. Two stories will be set free on February 1st, and two more on February 15th. Just visit www.intergalacticmedicineshow.com and explore the table of contents; the free stories will be clearly marked.

Issue one’s free story will be “Trill and The Beanstalk” by Edmund R. Schubert, issue two’s will be “Yazoo Queen” by Orson Scott Card (from his Alvin Maker series), issue three’s “Xoco’s Fire” by Oliver Dale, and issue four’s “Tabloid Reporter To The Stars” by Eric James Stone. Each story is fully illustrated by artists who were commissioned to create artwork to accompany that tale — as is every story published in IGMS.

“Tabloid Reporter To The Stars” will also be featured in the upcoming InterGalactic Medicine Show anthology from Tor, which will be out this August (we wanted you to get a sneak peek of the anthology, too). However, the other three stories aren’t available anywhere except the online version of IGMS.

It’s really quite simple. Great stories. Custom illustrations. Free. We’re pleased with and proud of the magazine we’re publishing; now we’re passing it along to our friends and telling them about it. We hope you’ll enjoy it and do the same.

Edmund R. Schubert
Editor, Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show
www.intergalacticmedicineshow.com

And for those of you who read Shades of Milk and Honey, most of the characters in the book got their names from friends. Edmund gave his first name to Mr. Dunkirk.

I think I’ve just had an epiphany about the writers who are clearly writing SF but say, “I don’t write SF.”

Allow me to explain. My last couple of sales have been stories which can be called horror to varying degrees. Now if you ask me what I’ve written, I’ll tell you that I write SF and Fantasy. The word “horror” will not cross my lips, not because I’m ashamed, but because I don’t think about it because that’s really not what I’m focused on writing. I was having this conversation and someone said, “You should join HWA.”

I laughed and said, “I’m not a horror writer…”

Except, I sort of am, at least as much as I’m an SF or a fantasy writer. But the difference for me is that I don’t read horror. It scares me. No joke. I like stories that make me all weepy, but not the ones that make me afraid to turn off the lights.

So, the horror stories that I write are ones that deal with stuff I want to read which tend to be, um, love stories. Yeah, I know… there’s a little incongruity there. That said, these are stories in which I do really, really bad things to people and, with the stories for Apex, am deliberately trying to write visceral horror. But when I’m doing it, I’m also trying to make sure that every bad thing that happens to my character reflects on her and on her relationships. At the end, I want you to know more about the character than you did at the beginning, because that’s the kind of story I like reading.

I know that I am writing horror, but I don’t think of myself as a horror writer.

Which makes me think that the people who say, “But I don’t write sci-fi,” really mean, “but I don’t read sci-fi.” Whatever SF tropes and tools show up in their stories, that’s part of the toolbox that they are using to tell the kinds of stories they are interested in. So, yeah, I’ll bite. They aren’t writing SF. When they read their own stories, they aren’t reading SF either.

But that doesn’t mean you or I aren’t reading SF when we read the same story.

After Steve, Lee and I met up, we went to the Long Acre pub to meet Stel Pavlou. We had a nice lunch and were joined by Stel’s friend James. Afterwards, we all followed Steve to Forbidden Planet for the booksigning of Elemental

I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t this. I had no idea that a place like Forbidden Planet existed. It’s a store dedicated to science fiction, fantasy, horror and “cult entertainment”. They’ve got graphic novels, anime, manga, videos of every SF show ever made…astounding. In the midst of the SF section, they had set up a table with a pile of books for Steve, Lee, and Stel to sign. They were joined by Michael Marshall Smith, one of the other authors in the Elemental anthology. For an hour they signed books and chatted with customers.

And then there was Liam. Picture a little boy, very slight, about nine years old. Now put him in a Jedi cloak and give him a lightsabre. Further, give him no parental supervision and free range. He understood that the four people at the table were some sort of celebrity and that things signed by them were more valuable, so he brought them all manner of things to sign, none of which had anything to do with Elemental. They were remarkably gracious and Liam did break up the monotony of the signing, I’m sure.

I spent money on books. I bought a copy of Elemental , of course, as well as Stel’s Gene, Tobias Buckell’s Crystal Rain, Steve’s Inheritance, and the Doctor Who short story anthology Short Trips: Past Tense. Whew. That’s a lot of reading material.

After the signing, everyone except Michael Marshall Smith went to another pub, which I’ve forgotten the name of, and met up with Ian Farrington (editor of the Dr. Who anthology I had purchased), Simon Guerrier, Joseph Lidster (two of the authors in it) and Lizzie, a voice actor for Dr. Who as well as one of the anthology authors. We geeked out on Dr. Who for a while, which was very satisfying for me.

I also indulged in a pint of Cider, which you can’t get in Iceland. Mmmm….

Then we were off to Woodlands, although by this point the group had dwindled to just Steve, Lee, Stel and me. This was a phenomonal vegetarian Indian restaraunt that Steve had recommended. It was just around the corner from his dad’s office, so Steve just asked the chef to send out a variety of food for us. All of it was exquisite. I highly recommend this place next time you are in London.

After far too much food, we all waddled back to our various accomodations. To my surprise, the dorm room in the hostel was clean. Only two bunks showed signs of residents, although neither one was in when I got back. I got into bed and collapsed, satisfied with the day.

Later, I discovered that everyone had moved out except for the two who snored.

In the morning, I packed my bags and headed to Steve and Lee’s hotel. While the hostel was fine for sleeping (aside from snoring boys) the showers were so awful as to be almost unusable. Each shower had a single thin stream of water about the width of my little finger. There was no way to adjust the temperature. There was also no way I was going to be able to wash my hair in it. Saturday, I just didn’t wash my hair, and counted on product to see me through the day, but Sunday, Steve and Lee said I could use theirs. Ah, heaven.

Once I was clean and presentable, we went out for sightseeing. First stop, 221B Baker Street for the Sherlock Holmes museum. This was interesting because they treat it as if Holmes and Watson were real people so the whole thing is laid out as if it were really their flats. I don’t think it gives me anymore insight into the stories, but it does make me revise my idea of room size. The rooms were tiny, tiny, tiny.

Then it was off to Whitechapel to look at the narrow streets where Jack the Ripper dwelled.

And then it was time for tea. We elected to go back to their hotel and have tea there. I so love clotted cream.

And that was the last of my London adventures. I caught the train back to the airport, and now I’m home.