Alastair Mayer’s T-Space Blog

I’m trying something new with the website. I found a WordPress plugin, amazon-machine-tags, which makes it very easy to pull in information about a book from Amazon’s site. I’m going to try it for a while (see my essay on Niven’s “Neutron Star” for an example), if it’s annoying just let me know via the comments.

In other news, I just returned the proofs for my short story “The Gremlin Gambit” to MindFlights, so it should be appearing there soon. It was fun to write and people tell me it’s fun to read. I’m wondering if I could sustain that to expand the story perhaps to novella or novel length; if it proves popular I may try.

Okay, the headline may be a bit over the top. My daughter just finished her final open water dives for her SCUBA certification. (She took the course through her high school as last semester’s PE requirement, how cool is that?) I was out there to watch part of that. I used to be a pretty avid diver myself, and logged maybe 150 dives (don’t have my logbook handy for the exact number) before I stopped bothering to log them. Deep, night, cave, wreck, ice, reef — I’ve done most of it except mixed-gas, which wasn’t an option for sport divers in my day. But it’s been a while since then.

There hasn’t been much in the way of dive-related science fiction, unless you count some of Clive Cussler’s novels as SF, or James Cameron’s movie The Abyss. That’s changed some in recent years, with the likelihood of oceans under the ice of moons like Europa, and Alastair Reynolds and others have set interesting stories there. Certainly any terraformed planet is going to have oceans and lakes, with all kinds of exotic flora and fauna. (By the way, to get a real feel for just how alien life can be even on Earth, take a look at the marine invertebrates, sponges, worms and the like that live in our oceans — sometimes it’s hard to tell the fauna from the flora!)

Watching my daughter’s class gear up for their dives got me itching to get back in the water again, so I just signed up with a local dive store for a skills refresher (my doctor’s already signed off on it). That’s next weekend. The last time I was in SCUBA gear was over 15 years ago, in a neutral buoyancy tank at Space Camp (the UAT, Underwater Astronaut Trainer); I’m looking forward to this.

The DASFA meeting was fun, and the signing Sunday at Who Else! Books for Footprints went great! About 25 to 30 people showed up, including Colorado authors Connie Willis, Carrie Vaughn, Mario Acevedo and Ed Bryant. Sure it was mostly for my co-contributer Jim Van Pelt and because they know the bookstore owners, but it was still a thrill to have them in the audience, and to meet with them afterwards. And I finally have a copy of Footprints in my hands.

On Tuesday I finally finished up some requested revisions for a short story and sent that back, and now I’m back to getting a novel in shape to put on the market.

Yesterday and part of today I spent time putting up more bookshelves in the basement and unloading boxes of books (from one and two moves back) onto them. It looks like I’m going to run out of shelves before I run out of books at this point. I love books, but it’s starting to get out of hand.

Oh, and Happy Birthday, Fiona!

This evening I’ll be a the monthly DASFA (Denver Area SF Association) meeting (community room of the Whole Foods Market at 1111 South Washington Street in Denver; meeting time is at 7:00 PM), to help launch the Footprints anthology. Better-known author James Van Pelt, who has the lead story in the book, will also be there. It should be fun.

Tomorrow, July 19, Jim and I will be at Who Else! Books in Denver, for a signing of Footprints (copies will be available at a discount price). Refreshments and copies of Van Pelt’s other books will be available. This is also a sneak preview of Who Else’s new digs, they are in the process of moving from the old Denver Book Mall to the new Broadway Book Mall, at 200 So Broadway. We’ll be there at 3:00 — it will be the FIRST signing ever at the new book mall. Their number is 303-744-BOOK (2665). Come on out.

I have three words to say about this movie: go see it.

Okay, I have a few more words. Sam Rockwell’s acting (as Sam Bell) is superb, they get the science right (if you give them the basic premise), and the plot turns in ways you might not expect. (I was expecting twists, and knew some of the basic premise from what I’d read about the movie, but I was still surprised — pleasantly so.)

Moon is one of the most intelligent SF movies I’ve seen in a long time, without the largely incomprehensible (if you haven’t read the book) ending of, say, 2001: A Space Odyssey. (There’s an obvious homage to 2001 in Moon‘s set design.) I hope the movie makes a bundle, that might encourage more like it.

If you’re looking for them, there are trivial nits to pick, mostly due to the fact that we still can’t film on location on the Moon. But spending a few tens of millions to fake Lunar gravity wouldn’t have added anything to the story, and in fact they do get the gravity right in a couple of outside scenes and where Sam is comfortably carrying something that would be heavy on Earth.

In the Denver area it’s playing at the Mayan, where you can enjoy an adult beverage while you’re watching, as well as at the Westminster Promenade. As they say, check your local listings. (It’s rated “R”, apparently for language because Sam uses the f-word a few times when he’s understandably stressed out. If they’d wanted a PG-13 rating it wouldn’t have been difficult, but it’s not exactly a “summer action flick”.)

Like I said: go see it.

Reader John Murphy, in a comment to my page on Neutron Star as detective fiction, asks about anthologies of SF detective fiction other than single-author collections. While I can think of several of the former, for multiple authors only Dann and Dozois’s anthology Future Crimes comes immediately to mind.

I’m sure there are others; I vaguely remember at least one collection of science-fictiony Sherlock Holmes stories. Any suggestions?

Last day at FiestaCon/Westercon. I’ll be heading to the airport in a few hours, but before that there are still a couple of interesting panels, including one on alien languages with Stan Schmidt and Juliette Wade, and a meeting with Beth Meacham, Executive Editor at Tor.

I hope everyone had a great 4th of July; I did. It’s been a lot of fun. I met a couple of people I hadn’t seen or heard from in years, in one case since the old BIX days (hi Henry! hi Rick!), plus the usual fun of meeting someone for the first time who turns out to have several connections with you that you were both unaware of. Since this is my fourth day of the con I’m feeling a little shell-shocked (but in a good way). I hope this is more or less coherent. I intend to come back through these last two posts and fill in some links. Stay tuned.

As I write this it’s early Friday evening in Tempe, Arizona.  The convention is definitely ramping up from yesterday, as more people arrive for the weekend.

Which is by no means to say that it’s been boring, far from it.  So far I’ve had some great conversations with Stan Schmidt, editor of Analog; author Michael Stackpole; Tor editors Patrick and Theresa Neilson Hayden; and fellow Denver author Dave Boop.   I’ve made a few interesting new contacts and met a fellow participant of the Kris and Dean workshop a couple of weeks ago.   And the weekend is just getting started.

Of course there are also the costumers (and the cosplay), the gamers, the media fans, science panels (I’m heading off to a panel on the Lunar Reconaissance Orbiter in just a minute) and more.  Great con.   Giving me some ideas for MileHiCon this October, too.  (Rose asked me to help out with science programming.)

If you’ve never been to a science fiction con (not to be confused with something like Comic-Con or StarFest), and you have any interest in reading fantasy or science fiction, you should find a local regional con and give it a try.

Coming up in a few weeks I’m scheduled as a speaker at the July 18 DASFA (Denver Area SF Association) meeting. (Their web site is somewhat dated, but the meeting time/place info is still correct.). The next day (July 19), I’ll be at Who Else! Books in Denver, signing copies of the Footprints anthology. Better than that, fellow (and better known) Colorado author James Van Pelt will also be at the signing, he has a story in Footprints too. (Jim may also be speaking at the DASFA meeting the evening before, I’m a bit fuzzy on the details.)

Before that, I’ll be going to Westercon (aka FiestaCon), the big western regional SF con in Temp, Arizona over the July 4th weekend. I’m just a con-goer at this one, not speaking, but I’m looking forward to seeing some old friends and meeting new ones. I’ll be cleverly disguised as myself, if you see me feel free to step up and say hello.

A short post from the road (you’d almost think this was Twitter) as I’m enroute to the track of the Yellowstone hotspot, i.e. the Snake River valley. The hotspot is currently sitting under Yellowstone Park, a while back it caused the lava flows that make up Craters of the Moon National Monument, and apparently originated under what’s now southeast Oregon. And I’m headed to Oregon for a writer’s workshop with prolific and award-winning authors (and editors) Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Katherine Rusch. Should be a good time. I’m getting fired up to write just thinking about it.