Karl Schroeder (previously) is literally the most visionary person I know (and I've known him since 1986!): he was the first person to every mention "fractals" to me, then "the internet" and then "the web" — there is no one, no one in my circle more ahead of more curves, and it shows in his novels and none moreso than Stealing Worlds, his latest, which is a futuristic roadmap to how our present-day politics, economics, technology and society might evolve.
Karl Schroeder's 2014 novel Lockstep featured tour-de-force worldbuilding, even by the incredibly high standards of Karl Schroeder novels: the human race speciates into cold-sleeping cicadas who only wake for one day in ten, or a hundred, or a million, allowing them to traverse interstellar distances and survive on the meager energy and materials available in deep space; with his new novella The Million, Schroder shows us how Lockstep is lived on Earth, the cradle of the human species, where a brutal murder threatens to blow apart the life of a very out-of-step protagonist.
Joey from ASU's Center for Science and the Imagination sez, "Today, we published Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities, a free digital collection of fiction and nonfiction about the near future of space exploration, with special attention to issues of public policy, equity, and economics/financing. — Read the rest
"His hair was whiter than his flesh. Thick whorls of ice embedded his beard in icicles like a January cataract; more separated the thick hairs of his eyebrows into individual daggers, pushed back by the yuletide winds of the stratosphere so that they swept down to meet at the bridge of his narrow, blue-tinged nose."
Yesterday, I reviewed Karl Schoeder's first YA novel, Lockstep, which combines genuinely brilliant techno-social speculation with a driving, exciting adventure plot.
Today I'm delighted to present the first two chapters of Lockstep, courtesy of Tor Books, so you can get a taste for this book yourself. — Read the rest
As I've written before,
Karl Schroeder is one of the sharpest, canniest thinkers about
technology and science fiction I know. In the nearly 30 years I've
know him, he's introduced me to fractals, free software, Unix,
listservers, SGML, augmented reality, the Singularity, and a host of
other ideas — generally 5-10 years before I heard about these ideas
from anyone else. — Read the rest
Tor.com has a sneak peek at Ashes of Candesce, the fifth volume in Karl Schroeder's astounding, heroic Virga series, about a post-Singularity civilization mining a pocket solar-system where the last pocket of human-comprehensible engineering knowledge has been preserved. This is hard-sf-meets-space-opera, full of big ideas and exciting low-gee, kerosene-fuelled pirate ships made of stunted lumber grown under an artificial sun. — Read the rest
Karl Schroeder sez, "This is a link to a teaser image for my upcoming reveal of the new graphic novel version of Sun of Suns, my far-future freefall steampunk pirate adventure. I'll be introducing the project, the artists and company–and the art–this Saturday night at 6:00 p.m. — Read the rest
Karl Schroeder, a fantastic science fiction author (see this review for a taste of his work) has spent the past two years in a Master's programme in Foresight at the Ontario College of Art and Design. In this guest essay on Charlie Stross's blog, he describes the way that structured study of the future interacts with science fiction. — Read the rest
Starting on February 1, 2010, and running through until May 30, I will
be Toronto Public Library's Writer in Residence, working out of the
Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Speculation at the
Lillian H. Smith branch at College and Spadina.
Here's writer, futurist and all-round dude Karl Schroeder's talk from this year's O'Reilly Open Source Con: "The Rewilding: A Metaphor." In his inimitable style, Karl first describes a semi-human future in which things as abstract as "nature" and "politics" participate directly in the economy and in online discussions, then connects this to open source and open government. — Read the rest
A reader writes, "Science fiction novelist Karl Schroeder's written a great piece on why those waiting for the smartbots to come drag our bacon out of the greenhouse are sorely mistaken:"
[L]et's assume that … within about 25 years, computers will exceed human intelligence and rapidly bootstrap themselves to godlike status.
Karl Schroeder's Queen of Candesce picks up where his amazing Sun of Suns left off, in Virga, the strangest and best-realized world I've encountered in science fiction's many universes, a vast pressurized bag floating in dead space, with Candesce, the artificial sun, in its center. — Read the rest
Award-winning sf writer Karl Schroeder has just released his debut novel, Ventus under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial- NoDerivs license, meaning that you can download it, share it and copy it as much as you like. Karl's one of my favorite writers in the field, and has been a pal of mine since I was a teenager — he's always seemed to be one step ahead of everyone else (he was the first person to use the word "fractal" in conversation with me). — Read the rest
Alex sez, "Karl Schroeder just posted an awesome essay on Worldchanging about how SF thinking about Mars colonization effortsm may actually prove the smartest, shortest route to creating the kinds of innovation we need to live on Earth without destroying the planet's climate and ecosystems. — Read the rest
Fans of Karl Schroeder's "Virga" novels are creating RPGs based on his world. Karl's tickled pink by this and is encouraging readers to share their creations publicly (he's also promising that he's not interested in suing or threatening people for misappropriating his copyrights on this score, figuring, correctly, that none of this stuff costs him anything, that it cements his relationship with his readers, and sells more books). — Read the rest
John "Old Man's War" Scalzi interviewed Karl "Sun of Suns" Schroeder on his blog today. Karl is the best world-builder in science fiction today, a mad imagination harnessed to an incisive scientific mind.
5. You've done some writing for the Canadian Military.
My pal Karl Schroeder, a brilliant sf writer, gave an excellent interview to the Small World podcast. Karl is the best worldbuilder in the business, with novels like Ventus (a world of nanoaware semantically tagged devices gone mad), Permanence (an interstellar cult sets out to ensure that humans don't become nonsentient spacefarers who build space-ships like beavers build dams) and others (I've just finished reading and blurbing his incredible forthcoming novel Sun of Suns, which has wooden spaceships fighting zero-gravity kerosene-mine wars in a giant pressurized bag of fullerene that encompasses a lost civilization that has escaped the Singularity). — Read the rest
Congratulations are due: my friend and writing collaborator Karl Schroeder won the Aurora Award — Canada's answer to the Hugo — today, for best novel, for his book Permanence.
Permanence is Karl's second novel, and it's brilliant — at its core is a massive, hard-sf conceit: that because tool-use expends more energy than adaptation (i.e., — Read the rest
This month's Locus magazine features Charlie Stross Brown's interview with Karl Schroeder, the author of such brilliant sf novels as "Permanence" and "Ventus."
"My hometown of Brandon had a population of about 45,000 and a university, so there was an interesting mix of people: intellectuals, farmers… (it also had one of the province's largest mental institutions).
