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I'm going to MONTREAL! Lovely city, great place to be, and as long as I'm there I thought I might as well take in Anticipation, Worldcon 2009. What with me being up for a Hugo and all.
If you're going to be there as well, why not say hello? I'm not standoffish.
Here's my schedule:
Thursday
2:00 PM 1hr 30min P-518A One Genre or Many?
Friday
9:00 AM 1hr P-512CG Why Write Across the Genres?
Fri 3:30 PM 30min P-Autographs Michael Swanwick Signing
Saturday
11:00 AM Signing & Schmoozing at Tachyon Booth (hucksters room)
2:00 PM 1hr 30min P-522B, Landscape in Fiction as Character; the language of landscape
Sunday
12:30 PM P-514AB The New York Review of Science Fiction – I was a last-minute addition to this one; I graciously agreed to take the “con” position.
Sunday Evening Sometime -- 8:00 PM maybe? The Hugo Awards Ceremony – All the pomp and pageantry of losing yet another major award! I've been through these things many times and it really is like a microcosm of your career. For most of the weekend, your friends are congratulating you, slapping your back, and wishing you all the best, and then . . . Well, an embarrassed silence falls over the rest of the convention. You're as good as forgotten. You look back on Saturday with nostalgia.
As you can probably guess, I enjoy the whole awards process, and I milk it for all the drama I can get.
Monday
10:00 AM 1hr P-511A Movements in Fantasy – They mean literary movements, not the kind you were thinking of. What were you, brought up in a barn?
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7 comments:
It's been out for a while now, so I suppose someone already pointed it out; but on the off chance no one has, I thought I'd point out this erratum in THE DRAGONS OF BABEL, in case you want to go all Chip Delany on us and start keeping lists:
p. 132 of the hardback, halfway down the page, the paragraph beginning "The wodewose raised the pipe again..."; the second sentence reads "Will was barely about to leap back from it in time", but presumably ought to read "Will was barely able to leap back from it in time".
...Left as a comment to your latest post since I couldn't think of how else to get it to you without a stamp.
Incidentally, I've loved the first 132 pages...
Thank you much, Stephen. I'll make a note of this, and get it changed when the book goes out of print and then back in again.
This is exactly the kind of typo that is most hard to prevent. Not only does it involve a rather bland adjective turning to a rather bland preposition, but it's set right in the middle of a fight scene, which for a writer is one of the least interesting parts of a book.
Oh, and you're the first to point that out. Sharp eye you've got there!
Continuing my 'posting here just cause...'
I wonder how many people read Dragons of Babel in the same month as they read Lud-of-the-Mist (as I did, both more or less inspired by your Readercon interview (and I read Hope in the Mist too, just for completion's sake, which I also liked a lot)). It was fun to see the various nods: not only fennel, which you mention on the blog somewhere IMS, but the shout-out to the Debatable Hills, the use of the Moon/Stars/Sun/Apples oath, and even in vocabulary choice (perhaps I'm wrong -- but would you really have used "cicerone" otherwise?).
I'm almost tempted to go reread Iron Dragon's Daughter to see if you did the same there. Hmmm.
And I wonder how many books which I have read too long ago, or have not yet read at all, did you nod to that I missed? (These "dragons" of yours, for instance: it seems to me that some writer somewhere used something similar, except a lizard, not a machine. Now where was that?)
Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed the book (as I have all your novels), and eagerly await the possible third "dragons" book. Are any of the short stories about this universe *not* simply excerpts from the books (i.e. I wouldn't have read them just having read the novels)?
Oh, and, incidentally, I read the Stone Lion's Tale out loud to my wife the other night; it works quite well as a stand-alone story, and a good one for reading outloud. The punchline ("Oh, him?") had her in stitches...
Wow. That's a very thoughtful commentary, and I apologize that I can't respond to it in any detail. (I'm at a tricky place in the new novel.)
I don't think I read the lizards book you mention, but I could be wrong. Consciously, the strongest influence on my dragons were Le Guin's in the Earthsea books -- though hers are nothing like the evil bastards mine are.
But, yes, my two dragon novels are chock-a-block with references to classic fantasies. Some can be found in the acknowledgments. Most are simply there because ... well, because the novel is so ample and commodious a form that I COULD.
And of course it's pleasant to have a connection, however tenuous, between my books and those that most moved me.
I don't think I read the lizards book you mention, but I could be wrong.
That was supposed to be a joke, with me pretending to only vaguely realize that the entire notion of dragons predated your books (by "lizard" I just meant "not a machine"). Ah well. "Fail", as the kids say these days.
I like LeGuin's dragons. But I suppose my favorite dragon is Smog...
Good luck with the novelistic trickiness.
(And by "fail" I mean on my part, of course, not yours.)
Ahhhh. Earth humor. I understand now.
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