Recently in post-cyberpunk Category

David Louis Edelman is a happy man. Not only he has written two novels that are getting rave reviews everywhere (Infoquake and Multireal, the first two parts of the Jump 225 Trilogy), both he recently has become father to twins, the gorgeous Abigail Blakeway Edelman and Benjamin Blakeway Edelman. Just before the twins were born, we sent him a few questions on his novels, literary influences, and future projects. Enjoy.

PWT - Peter Watts called Infoquake "a successful hybrid of Neuromancer and Wall Street". Do you agree? What is the real influence of the cyberpunks in your work?

David Louis Edelman - The cyberpunks in general (and William Gibson in particular) have been great influences on me in the writing of Infoquake and MultiReal. If you're going to write a novel about the intersection between humans, software, and business, you can't help but think about Gibson, Sterling, Stephenson, Rucker, etc. Kind of like if you're going to write a novel about heroic quests, you can't help but think about Tolkien. But I'd like to think I'm approaching things from a different and less cynical angle. As for Wall Street, I actually never even saw the movie until a few years ago. I do enjoy Oliver Stone's films, but I have to admit that Wall Street seems a bit dated.

PWT - What is approximately the time period between today and YOR in Infoquake?

DLE - I never specifically mention the year when the books take place. All I divulge is that it's been at least three hundred and fifty years since the current epoch of history began. Part of that is just your typical science fiction hocus-pocus to make things seem less implausible. (If you leave the specific timeframe vague, then there's plenty of room for fudging it.) But behind the scenes, I did pick a specific year, and I've been very careful to make sure the dates fall on the right day of the week. I won't say exactly what year that is, but I will say that it's a little shy of a millennium in the future.

PWT - The glossary and the appendixes are a very nice, considerate touch to improve the experience of the readers, and they reminded me of another novel who seems to share some of the characteristics of Infoquake: Dune. Would you agree with that? Do you like Frank Herbert´s Dune universe, and did it influence you in any way?

DLE - I am a huge fan of the Dune books. (Frank Herbert's Dune books, that is. I think the Brian Herbert/Kevin Anderson books leave something to be desired, to say the least.) Herbert was combining so many different ideas in those books -- Arab nationalism, sustainable ecology, the Campbellian mythological hero, feudalism in space -- that it's amazing they hang together at all. But they do. The sheer weirdness of Herbert's vision of the deep future goes pretty far beyond anything else I've ever read. Herbert has definitely inspired me to aim high, and not to compromise my vision for some misplaced concept of commercial success.

PWT - Speaking of books, what are your top five all-time favorite novels (they may be SF or not)?

DLE - Top five all-time favorite novels, in no particular order: Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.; The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien; Giles Goat-Boy by John Barth; Neuromancer by William Gibson; and perhaps The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon. Although ask me tomorrow and I might give you an entirely different five.

PWT - What made of you a writer in the first place? What (or who) did influence you?
DLE - I've always wanted to be a writer, ever since I was a kid. I'd have to say that my earliest influence was Stan Lee and the Marvel comics universe. I went from there into the classics of science fiction and fantasy -- Tolkien, Herbert, Le Guin, Asimov, Heinlein, etc. In my teenage years, I discovered Kurt Vonnegut. I moved on to a postmodern phase in college where I idolized writers like John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, Paul Auster and Philip Roth. Then in my late twenties I went (almost) full circle back to science fiction and fantasy; my favorite authors from this period are probably William Gibson and Neal Stephenson.

PWT - What can we expect of Geosynchron, the next novel of the Infoquake series? (BTW, it will really be a trilogy or there will be other stories in that universe?)
DLE - Geosynchron will definitely be the last novel of the trilogy. (I'm not precluding the possibility of writing additional novels in this universe down the road, but this particular story will come to an end at the conclusion of book 3.) As for what's in store in the final book... You're going to see the characters go off to places we haven't been before, like the Pacific Islands and the orbital colony of 49th Heaven. You're going to meet some of the Pharisees. You're going to see a lot more of Quell and delve into his relationship with Margaret Surina. And you're going to see a big ending that involves military strikes, philosophical debate, and (of course) creative marketing techniques. I think I can promise that it's going to be a very, very unique conclusion. Currently the schedule is for the book to hit the stores in early 2010.

PWT - What are your next projects?
DLE - I haven't decided what I'm doing after Geosynchron is done. I've been toying around with a dark fantasy novel, though I really don't have anything more than a fabulous idea and a few chapters at this point. There are a few other non-SF projects that I've had sitting on the back burner for over a decade at this point. One's a contemporary novel set in Washington, D.C. and Southern California, and the other's set in imperial Rome. We'll have to see how things play out.

Inspired by my friend Larry Nolen, I decided to make a list of authors that I read for the first time in 2008 that I found to have written good works. Following his example, I'll highlight those who moved me the most (Larry highlight the writers whose debut efforts came out in the U.S. this year, but since I live in Brazil, I thought I should do things a little bit differently):

Ekaterina Sedia

Jeff VanderMeer

Jacques Barcia (Brazilian author, not available in English translation)

Adam Roberts

Jeffrey Thomas

Ken McLeod

John Scalzi

Chris Roberson

Joe Abercrombie

Brandon Sanderson

David Louis Edelman

Forrest Aguirre

Jeff Carlson

Maurice Dantec

Christie Lasaitis (Brazilian author, not available in English translation)

Tobias Buckell

Robert T. Jeschonek

Jay Lake

Hal Duncan

Rhys Hughes

Ted Chiang

Stepan Chapman

Thomas Ligotti

Jeffrey Ford

Leena Krohn

Hannu Rajaniemi

Steph Swainston

Daniel Abraham

Eric Brown

Antônio Xerxenesky (Brazilian author, not available in English translation)

Otis Adelbert Kline

Naomi Novik

Joe Hill

Tibor Moricz (Brazilian author, not available in English translation)

Elizabeth Bear

Mark Newton

Sarah Monette

Sergei Lukyanenko

David Thorpe

M. J. Rose

Roberto Bolaño

Kelly Barnhill

Conrad Williams

Katherine Sparrow

Ludimila Hashimoto (Brazilian author, not available in English translation)

Kelly Link

Tony Ballantyne

Neal Asher

Karl Schroeder

Alan Pauls

Felix Gilman

Matthew Pearl

Patrick Ness

Author Ian McDonald says there's a new Brasyl short story in Postscripts 15. [A Ghost Samba], he explains, "doesn't necessarily fit into the schema of the book, but then that's the point".

Postscripts has also fiction by Jay Lake, Chris Roberson, Matthew Hughes, Paul Di Filippo, Michael Moorcock and many more.

Nuff said.

(Via Bowing to the Future)

You're reading a book. A damn good book about a bank robbery that happens in a Massive Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game (MMORPG), perpetrated by a band of forty orcs and a dragon. By page 150something the plot tells you that the case is not about hackers stealing magic blades, but a kind of financial terrorist attack that involves online gaming as a means to find an end. From the middle of the book onwards, the plot becomes a croudsourced spy-technothriller with Live Action RPGs. And you end up thinking: "why it couldn't be just about that damn bank robbery?" That's Charles Stross' Hugo-nominated novel Halting State, a book you like enough to recommend it, but not because of its execution.

Because you read Charles Stross looking for his ideas. And you saw so many of them you caught your head spinning in every chapter. Theory of fun, game economics, game culture, online games, cell-phones-as-grid-computers, quantum cryptography, augmented reality, global diplomacy and post-industrial economics, just to name a few, are stuffed in those 350 pages, a gamelike near-future science fiction that's really a discussion about life as a big game which roles one chooses to play according to the available setting.

And you are an old-time gamer. Both in tabletop RPGs, BBS MUDs, LARPs, RTSG, FPSG, and recent MMORPG, ARGs and virtual reality social medias. So you are actually familiar with the jargon Stross uses to invoke that sense of strangeness in his prose. And you also know why he uses the second person throughout the novel to describe the action. He wants a novel that communicates to gamers and wants to pay homage to those same games, from D&D to Crysis, and make non-gamers think about the impact of gaming culture in the next ten or twenty years.

There are three main character in Halting State. Sue, a police officer from post-independence Scotland that, like every cop, relies too much in CopSpace, an augmented reality web service that feeds info through specs and mobile phones; Elaine, a forensic accountant that, as a hobbie, is in a augmented reality LARP of medieval sword battles reenactment and; Jack, a games programmer, heavy player and a guy full of secrets.

You think the first half of Halting State is pure fun, specially because of all the in-game scenes and dot com culture. But precisely because you're a gamer, and more specifically, your group's gamemaster (or storyteller, or dungeon master...), you know the things that spoil a gaming group's fun. One of which is: you can't twist the plot too much. If you say the game's about X, then it becomes Y, that's ok. If Y becomes Z, then it starts loosing its focus. Also no-fun is to resolve the plot with the words of a non-player character, or even worse, explain all the plot out of character.

And when you realize Stross committed those three sins, specially in the final quarter of the book, you feel rather disappointed. Mostly because you know he's a good writer and that's a good story, but one that turned into something not as good as it could have been. The third sin, that happens in the very last pages, you feel the most. The second person narrative vanishes and gives place to a full explanation of the things that happened.

But in the end, you feel the week you spent reading Halting State was more pleasure than pain, even if there's a bittersweet taste left for not being the book you expected. In the least, you end up envisioning how the next decade will be, when all the gamers will be the active economic force. Specially for those involved in gaming culture, you believe that's a worthy read.

Following, in our Hugo nominees review week, there´s a reprint of my take on Ian McDonald´s Brasyl. Enjoy.

Parallel lives, parallel times, parallel universes. And a single country. Or not quite so. In Brasyl, Irish writer Ian McDonald opens a window to three distinct landscapes: one futurist, descendent of cyberpunk tradition; other contemporary, an echo of news services and the fever of reality shows; and, at last, one in the past, in a mysterious and predatory jungle, an independent world inside a colony. Linking all these three universes, so distant from each other, and at the same time so close, is quantum physics, its possibilities and its consequences.

The book tells the story of three characters separated in time and space. In 2006 Rio de Janeiro, Marcelina Hoffman is a TV producer specialized in reality shows seeking Barbosa, the goalkeeper of the fateful 1950 final, when Brazil lost for Uruguay in the Maracanã stadium. In ultra-surveillance society of 2032 São Paulo, entrepreneur and street guy Edson Jesus Oliveira de Freitas has his life turned upside down when he gets involved with a girl member of a gang of quantumeiros, physicians that use illegal quantum computing to break any kind of code. And in 1732 Amazon, Jesuit father Luis Quinn hunts, in the name of the Church and the Portuguese Crown, another father that would be building his own theocracy in the heart of the jungle. And in the middle of all this, two conspiracies that crosse the wall between realities: one tries to keep the multiverse a secret, while the other tries to open up the realities as the only way to save them.

But Brasyl is much more than this. It is a book that keeps the title Science Fiction has earned: that of last representative of the literature of ideas. Just because of that, Brasyl is not an easy book, even less a conventional SciFi book.

In it, McDonald builds, in those three narrative lines, three discussions: the number of lives an individual may have, the quantity of landscapes and societies a country can have and, finally, how many different worlds fit in a universe. It is a tour, from micro to macrocosm, about the nature of identity. It is a book about philosophy, physics and the nature of reality. About choices, secrets and masks. It is a book about a country that never were and maybe never will be. About parallel realities, but focused in their similitudes rather than their differences.

In the end, Brasyl is not even a single book, but many, inside a single tome of about 400 pages. That is because McDonald wrote, between the lines, that he could have made many other books with the same premise, the same elements and the same characters. Brasyl could have been a book about interdimensional intrigue. It could have been an action-packed book, with capoeira, gunshots and swordfights. It could have been an epic in the jungle. It could have been a book about the future of a country dominated by soap operas and reality cop shows, controlled by a surveillance system that monitors, from the stratosphere, every person, every object. Not that all these elements are not present in McDonald's book. There are fight scenes in which capoeira is described in all its beaty, an afro-descendent version of Hong Kong movies. There are swordfights, both in 18th century chivalric tradition, and in a future one, with the Q-Blades, capable of cutting in the quantum level.

But instead, McDonald decided to spend most of the book writing about three characters and their individual parallel realities: a blond girl that is also a capoeira practiotioner and tries to keep her beauty just to be a little happier, and at the same time that maintains a love affair with a colleague without knowing if that is love at all; a priest, that is an assassin and a general; and a man that by day is an entrepreneur, in love for a Japanese descendent girl, by night is a cross-dresser, a dance queen, and in the weekends is a super-hero, a homoerotic fetish.

And McDonald tells these stories using a special, poetic and labyrinthine prose. The points of view going back and forth, both between the three main characters, as in their minds eye, their memories and multiple lives, too often jump to different scenes in the same paragraph. The structure McDonald uses in Brasyl completes the notion of parallel realities and is the mark of an author that has control over his book.

Through three main characters, both believable and empathic, McDonald explores the nature of Brazilian people. Even if he hasn't lived in Brazil, doing his research in a couple of visits to São Paulo, Bahia and the Amazon, and reading the few books about Brazil available in English, McDonald was able to capture, with amazing precision, the Brazilian spirit. And he did this without clichés, without hullabaloos, but with critical observations regarding the importance Brazilian people gives to beauty, soccer and TV. Besides, everything is right with geography and it is linguistically better than most foreigners trying the language of Camões.

The author mixes his English with many terms in Portuguese, which causes a positive estrangement that is possibly much more interesting to fellow English speakers, but here it becomes the only and real downside of the book. There is a great deal of misspellings: non existent diacritical marks, misplaced accent marks and some inaccurate translations. But that is something that does not diminishes the book's brilliance and importance.

A hell of an accomplishment for a gringo, definitely Brasyl is a book Brazilians must read.