I found it beautifully written, and slightly disturbing in the way that excellent fiction or poetry should be disturbing.  The city in the book is haunting and always a bit distant, as if it is seen through the a gauze, an every city of  magic caught in a time of wrenching change.  Characters include alchemists, gargoyles, men of science, and most importantly, the woman Mattie, a being created of gear and wood and whalebone with a heart that must be wound.

This was not a fast read for me; it took a week.  It falls in the category of books I can put down when I need to do something else, but which I look forward to returning to.  The feel and the tone are pure fantasy, and I had to let go of a need to understand everything in order to enjoy the book.  I did end up very happy with it, and I recommend it highly.  Note that it is often referred to as steampunk, and I suppose that at its core it is steampunk.  But to call it that would be to put it into a bottle, and it feels broader and bigger.

The cover, by the way, is haunting.

The awards are administered differently than the Hugos.  It’s partly a voted choice, but mostly a long slog through almost everything “Fantasy” written all year.  The result is that the awards often end up going to works based more on merit and uniqueness than on commercial success or having a wide readership.   Kudos to the judges, who clearly did a lot of work.

I am loosely associated with Patrick Swenson’s Fairwood Press as the secretary of his Board of Directors (which means I take minutes once a year, not that I’m directly involved with the books).  I worked the table for him a few times at this convention.  That was a lesson.  Over half the dealers were booksellers, and my guess is half of the booksellers are “small” presses of various sizes.  They work.  Behind a table is a great place to be (I saw a lot of people I would have otherwise missed and collected and traded out many hugs and greetings), but those sales come hard.  They came one or two or three books an hour in that venue.  The small presses are pretty agile, and they’re all doing well with the Internet and social media, which is more than I can say for some New York publishers (although, finally, almost everyone gets it).  Anyway – lots of action and experimentation, but in the end, the sales are book by book by book.  By the way – why is a small press a “press” and a New York outfit a “publisher?”

Jay Lake did a great job as Toastmaster.  I’ve only seen him do that for small conventions before, and I must say he scaled well.

Pretty much everyone is there.  This time, I ponied up for the next two on the spot.  This is a good party not to miss.  It has replaced Worldcon at the top of my affections for conventions.  There is time to get into long conversations, the programming is great, and it’s less of a “how many panels can you get on” game.  The mass signing is run very well.

There are two more drawings left – one this Friday and one on the 10th which is the release date for the hardcover of Wings of Creation.  The release date drawing will be for all three books in a hardcover set (and the hardcovers of books one and two are getting rare, so this is an opportunity).

To enter:

Comment on this post on this website (www.brenda-cooper.com)

Go to www.thefiveworlds.com and send an email via the “contact us” form there

DM me at @brendacooper via Twitter

There’s a moment when you first hold a finished book and it feels like a just-birthed child.

It’s one of the moments when writing is worth it.

Now, don’t run out to the store yet, the release date is November 10th,  but it will be pretty on the shelves.   I have a reading on the 13th of November (Friday the 13th!) at the Seattle University Book Store with Jack Skillingstead and Louise Marley, and there will be copies available there.  You can even pre-reserve one from the University Bookstore if you want. I also have a reading at the Wayward Coffee House the next Saturday, and I will bring one giveaway copy to that (but there will not be books for sale there).  The Wayward is one of the best coffee houses in Seattle – funky, friendly, and full of science fictional references.

This series is an engaging for me as the George R.R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire.”  The books are a little shorter and are coming out more regularly, and so I feel like there’s a chance of an epic fantasy series that will begin well and end both well and on schedule.  That’s my hope for this after being disappointed waiting for the next Song of Ice and Fire book and after the Robert Jordan Wheel of Time series was interrupted (I am grateful the talented Brandon Sanderson is finishing them, but I haven’t read his book yet).  Yes, I am a fan of big fat fantasy, especially the broad and deep epic variety that has a theme and a story and interesting people on all sides of its conflicts.

I want to be careful of spoilers for either book, but the Named Lands are rich with both history and promise, and the novel is told through the eyes of many and varied protagonists, and the plot left the paths I thought it was walking often enough to please me immensely.

If you haven’t started the series, a taste is available in the story “A Weeping Czar Beholds the Fallen Moon” up on Tor.com.  To read more about Ken and his work, go by www.kenscholes.com.

Since it’s Halloween weekend, I’m going to bring  two copies of “Zombie Raccoons and Killer Bunnies” to give away at my regular reading on Sunday.  This is a great anthology edited by Kerrie Hughes and Martin Greenburg, and the cover has been getting press as excellent or just plain bad.  At the very least, it certainly has been getting attention.

I will also have a few Advanced Review Copies of “Wings of Creation,” which comes out November 10th (and which I’m very excited about).

Also, if you want to hear about Wings of Creation or Killer Bunnies (or actually, about a frog), drop by Seattle Geekly’s author spotlight for a half-hour podcast interview with me on a range of topics.   Recording that podcast was the most fun I’ve had in a busy few weeks.

The moderator was Tony C. Smith of Starship Sofa, guests lined up as Jeff Vandermeer and Jeremy Tolbert on one side (the soaked in internet technoratti) and Sheila Williams and Brian Bieniowski (from the venerable largely print Dell Magazine property Asimov’s Science Fiction).  The episode was birthed because Jeff and Jeremy declared the print magazines nearly dead, and Sheila, who’s magazine is doing-very-well-thank-you agreed to defend her printed child on the air.  Now, I won’t repeat the conversation since I’m hopeful readers will  go listen to the episode.  You’ll hear a lot of news about the industry presented in an interesting format, and both sides are often correct even when they disagree.

Now, I’ve been around the tech industry longer than I want to admit to, and today I’m the Chief Information Officer (chief computer and phone geek) for a medium-sized city.  So I have a little cred here.  The argument is essentially a microcosm of the larger one going on about the publishing industry.  It reminds me – tone and general content – of exactly the moments when technology giants came to crossroads and either died or re-birthed themselves.  Think of Asimov’s (or if you prefer, the whole New York print publishing industry) as the mainframe makers like IBM and Data General when the personal PC and small servers came along.  IBM – one of the best players in the field – nearly died then.  They didn’t, but they had to reinvent themselves.  The internet almost passed Microsoft by.  If Bill Gates wasn’t the kind of executive who stops and thinks about the long term from time to time, Microsoft might be a ghost today.  For Asimov’s – or for that matter Harper Collins – to survive, they will need to become flexible.  I’m seeing the risky experiments like Tor.com as rays of hope as the industry tries to slide along the surface tension of the argument about the value of content coupled with the social move to social media, which requires a different marketing approach than the old-school publishing industry is accustomed to.

The survivors in publishing will be the nimble, smart ones.  In ten years, we’ll be working with a combination of newer companies (watch new imprints like Pyr and new magazines like Fantasy and Clarkesworld) that live in the internet soup today and the familiar names we grew up with who got real about getting flexible but didn’t give up their heritage completely either.  In other words, we’ll have the start-ups that survive (and most won’t, but they run on prayers, volunteers, shoestrings , and donation buttons and taken together these are not yet a business model) and the big publishers that survive (I’d suggest making skunkworks, staying up with technology and working to at least be a voice at the table as the terms of new media are decided, and cutting costs where possible.  Mostly, getting faster and more flexible).

The next five years are going to be an interesting ride.

Blog admission of the day:  I know most of these players.  I’m sometimes lucky enough for my stories to appear in Asimov’s and Jeremy does my academy website, which promotes my current printed book series.  But that just made the conversation that much more interesting.

Blog recommendation of the day:  While you’re over at Starship Sofa grabbing the Sofanauts podcast, drop by the sofa itself and get a few fiction podcasts.

Did you listen to the podcast, and what did you think?

My monthly column – Today’s Tomorrows – is up at futurismic. This month, I did a short survey of a few of the interesting things on the space front.  For example, do you know where Spaceport America is?  And what is the Rocket Racing League?

Last, I blogged earlier about attending FiRe – a great conference on using technology to make the world better.  Drop by the SNS Blog “A Bright Fire” for a few posts about that – one written by me and the brilliant team I was lucky enough to work with.  Also available – the tweetstream for the conference is at #fireglobal.

And just so it’s not all about me, writer friend Pati Nagle pointed out a great post about building the cover design for Jeff Vandermeer’s Booklife.

I just finished Boneshaker last night.   Cherie Priest did a lovely job of characterization, and fully brought  Briar Wilkes Blue and Ezekial Blue to life on the page.  What she did to Seattle was fairly terrible, but interesting in an alternate fantasy historical fashion.   And she answered my question:  she gave us excellent reasons for goggles and weird guns and many of the other oddities about Steampunk. 

Well worth a read.  Even if, like me, you don’t much like zombies.  You can always  just close your eyes through those parts.

Mark has impressive strengths.  For one, he thinks well.  For years he has produced the successful  SNS technology newsletter, and he has racked up a number of “firsts” in prediction, including predicting the current recession.  He is also very good at putting the right people together.  This showed at the FiRe Global West Coast conference, where he collected an impressive group of researchers, entrepreneurs, investors, policy makers, science fiction writers, media personalities, educators, and heroes.  The mix included Michael Dell (CEO of Dell computers), multiple NPR correspondents, the head of Washington State Department of Commerce (Rogers Weed), Nobelist Lee Hartwell, author Greg Bear, futurist Glen Hiemstra, and more.

I feel lucky to have been on the Advisory Board and to host a team on stage.

I won’t be able to share the whole day.  It would fill a book.  The conference started at 7:00 AM and went until 9:00 PM without very much breathing time at all. I’ll do my best to capture the highlights.  The opening message was that now is a time to act, that for all intents and purposes our ability to solve problems in America is broken, and yet that we have better tools than ever before.   We need to use them.

To repeat – FiRe Global West Coast was all about using technology to save the world.

That means understanding the problem.  We were told how challenged the oceans are, and reminded that the beautiful sound we saw out the window behind us in dying.  We were reminded that American children are educated about the same way they were educated when we were children, in s pit of the new tools, that textbooks in some Washington State schools are eighteen (18!) years old and some urban schools don’t have enough computers to put together a single decent lab.  We were reminded that the dialogue of the American people with our elected officials is often a long line of two to three minute speeches that accomplish little and that permits can take years to acquire, thus shutting out startup companies from whole businesses.

There are solutions and possibilities.  We learned about a grant that will allow the University of Washington to put miles of fiber-optic cables on the bottom of the ocean to better understand the vastly unexplored sea and power real-time data. We heard about experiments that uncovered unknown super-learner children at schools who were unknown until the school moved to one technology device per child.  We were given ideas about entrepreneurial zones and about frameworks for government / citizen interaction.  We saw a number of new companies with great ideas in health care, green technology, and communications.

Of course, just to mix it up, there was some typical technology.  An interview with Michael Dell (Dell Computers), and another one with Rob Glaser (Real Networks).

It was an exhilarating, interesting day.  I took home story ideas, futurist ideas, and even new ways to think about my city job in technology.  The real proof of the effectiveness of FiRe Global will be the new ideas and synergies that come from the event.  I’m betting there will be some.

Related articles, blogs, and wikis:

Xconomy:  Top 10 Highlights from FiRe Global: Michael Dell, Lee Hartwell, Irwin Jacobs, and More
Briar Dudley’s blog at the Seattle Times: FiRE: Dell still not a netbook fan, especially with Windows 7
Moconews:  Michael Dell Says Phone Coming In 2010; May Use Platforms Beyond Android

Wiki from the CTO Challenge:  Mygov.wetpaint.com

The twitter hashtag is #FireGlobal.

I will blog elsewhere later about the CTO Challenge I hosted (Led by Chetan Sharma).