There are three more stops on my tour for Walkaway: tomorrow at San Diego Comic-Con, next weekend at Defcon 25 in Las Vegas, and August 10th at the Burbank Public Library. Read the rest

Scott Edelman writes, "I interviewed George R. R. Martin at a Thai restaurant on Episode 42 of my Eating the Fantastic podcast (MP3), and after I returned home, remembered I'd also interviewed him back in 1993. After digging out the tape, I couldn't resist incorporating his amusing admission about 'a fantasy novel I've been working on off and on for a while' as part of the episode." Read the rest

Walkaway is my first novel for adults since 2009 and I had extremely high hopes (and not a little anxiety) for it as it entered the world, back in April. Since then, I've been gratified by the kind words of many of my literary heroes, from William Gibson to Bruce Sterling to the kind cover quotes from Edward Snowden, Neal Stephenson and Kim Stanley Robinson. Read the rest

I'm teaching the Clarion Science Fiction writing workshop at UCSD in La Jolla this week, and tomorrow night at 7PM, I'll be reading from my novel Walkaway at Comickaze Liberty Station, 2750 Historic Decatur Rd #101, San Diego, CA 92106. Hope to see you! Read the rest

Galaxy was one of the first pulps to explicitly bill itself as a magazine for "adults," in 1950 under founding editor HL Gold. Read the rest

Of all the press-stops I did on my tour for my novel Walkaway, I was most excited about my discussion with Katherine Mangu-Ward, editor-in-chief of Reason Magazine, where I knew I would have a challenging and meaty conversation with someone who was fully conversant with the political, technological and social questions the book raised. Read the rest

Good Business is a short science fiction film about a very dodgy arms deal indeed, with a sting in its metaphorical tail; the film was created by Ray Sullian, adapted from Simon Roy's comic of the same name. (via JWZ) Read the rest

Chris Brown -- long known as a writer of perfect, jewel-like demented cyberpunk stories -- makes his long-overdue novel debut today with Tropic of Kansas; a hilarious, dark, and ultimately hopeful story of a terrible authoritarian president whose project to Make America Great Again has plunged the country into an authoritarian collapse that's all too plausible.

I enjoyed Rob Reid's 2013 science fiction humor novel, Year Zero, about a pan-galactic conspiracy by aliens who would rather destroy Earth than pay music royalties. Next month, Rob has a new novel coming out called After On, and I'm excited to read it. Here's what my friend Hugh Howey (author of the Wool series) has to say about After On: "Rob Reid doesn’t write science fiction; he writes future history. After On is the best account I’ve read of how superintelligence will arrive and what it will mean for all of us. Hilarious, frightening, believable, and marvelously constructed — After On has it all.”

If you want a sneak preview, you can read it on Medium, which is publishing twelve episodic excerpts from After On, starting today. Medium will also publish Rob's After On podcast that explores themes from the novel and interviews folks like Sam Harris, Steve Jurvetson, and Adam Gazzaley -- "on the future of tech, AI, and consciousness."

Here's what Rob wrote in a Medium post about his novel:

Set in present-day San Francisco, After On is the tale of an imaginary social media startup. A rather diabolical one, which attains consciousness. Its personality then emerges from its roots as a social network. So rather than going all Terminator and killing everyone, it basically becomes a hyper-empowered, superintelligent, 14-year-old brat. Yes, it has playful aspects. But After On is also a serious rumination on super AI risk — as well as on the promises and perils of synthetic biology.

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My latest Locus column is "Be the First One to Not Do Something that No One Else Has Ever Not Thought of Doing Before," and it's about science fiction's addiction to certain harmful fallacies, like the idea that you can sideline the actual capabilities and constraints of computers in order to advance the plot of a thriller. Read the rest

XPrize and ANA present a series of short stories "of the passengers from Flight 008, imagined by the world’s top science fiction storytellers, as they discover a future transformed by exponential technologies."

At 4:58am on June 28th, 2017, the passengers on board ANA Flight 008, en route from Tokyo to San Francisco, are cruising at an altitude of 37,000 feet, approximately 1,500 nautical miles off the West Coast of the United States. A small bump, otherwise noted as a barely perceptible bout of turbulence, passes Flight 008 through a temporary wrinkle in the local region of space-time. What these passengers will soon find out as they descend into SFO is that the wrinkle has transported them 20 years in the future, and the year is now 2037.

Writers in the anthology: Gregory Benford, Kathleen Ann Goonan, Brenda Cooper, Bruce Sterling, Hannu Rajaniemi, James Smythe, Nancy Kress, Daniel H. Wilson, Hugh Howey, James Morrow, Chen Qiufan, Madeline Ashby, Margaret Atwood, Karl Schroeder, Paolo Bacigalupi, Mike Resnick, Sheila Finch, Matt Hill, Charlie Jane Anders, Lee Konstantinou, Kevin J. Anderson, Eileen Gunn, and Charles Yu.

They are inviting the public to write a story based on this scenario. Winner gets $10,000 and a trip for two to Tokyo. Read the rest

Brian K Vaughan and artists Marcos Martin and Muntsa Vicente started syndicating The Private Eye just before the first Snowden revelations hit, which was a fortuitous bit of timing for them, since their surreal science fictional tale was set in a future where the rupture of all internet security had provoked humanity into banning the internet altogether, replacing it with a world where cable news was so dominant that the police had been replaced by reporters.

I just checked in for my o-dark-hundred flight to Denver tomorrow morning for this weekend's Denver Comic-Con, where I'm appearing for several hours on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, including panels with some of my favorite writers, like John Scalzi, Richard Kadrey, Catherynne Valente and Scott Sigler: Read the rest

Bruce Sterling's short story "The Beachcomber of Novi Kotor" is a monologue by a rogue Montenegran artist-roboticist, delivered at the 85th Venice Biennale, in a world where climate change has made venices out of all the world's low-lying cities, where Montenegro has been plunged into economic collapse by the precipitous departure of the neo-Czarist Russian oligarchs whose tourist trade it depended on. Read the rest

From 1989 to 1994, the public broadcaster TV Ontario ran Prisoners of Gravity, a brilliant science fiction TV show that used a goofy framing device (a host trapped in a satellite who interviewed science fiction writers stuck down on Earth) for deep, gnarly, fascinating dives into science fiction's greatest and most fascinating themes, from sex and overpopulation to cyberpunk and religion. Read the rest

Bilge Ebiri writes in The Village Voice: "No matter, because this after all is a Transformers movie, so soon we’re faced with fiiigjhkwetwnwwwjsahafajhwfohofoehaoowofoeoicioeciaqidjFaerlaeaffjgjlje XGRSXSsfdsmfjjjsomuchrandomstuffsomuchegjwogpjwd bldklhjitslikeyouthoughttheearliermovieswereeconfusinghahahah mfjff7ga98fhfhfplwxczchowarekidssupposedtounderstandanyofthisVSSH gmnskglactuallyhowareadultssupposedtounderstandanyofthisjskjjlvr lmnkrjsljrjsaywhatyouwillbutonceuponatimejsogrjdvpvarivpaeimp grfggjsfsfpoemichaelbayc" (via Kottke) Read the rest

Corie J Weaver writes to tell us that Dreaming Robot (previously is kickstarting its latest science fiction anthology for kids, The Young Explorer's Adventure Guide, "the fourth collection of science fiction stories for middle grade readers, with a focus on diversity and representation." Read the rest