The 2011 Hugo Award nominees were announced today on the web site of Renovation, this year's World Science Fiction Convention, and what an outstanding collection of work. It's truly wonderful to see the strength and range of the field; congratulations to all the nominees!

Have to say that I'm especially delighted to see fellow Gibraltar Point workshopper Peter Watts nominated for his short story, "The Things," which you can go read online at Clarkesworld. Yaaay, Peter.

You can learn more about the Hugo Award on the official web site.

Click to find out more about the Clarion Write-a-Thon.

Regular readers will know that I am deeply indebted to the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy writing workshop, and this summer, I'm going to try to pay that forward, and you can help. From June 26 to August 6, I'll be writing like mad, just like the students in this year's workshop, and I'm looking for people to sponsor me in the second annual Clarion "Write-a-Thon."

Like all *-a-thons, the goal is to raise money to support the Clarion workshop which, every year, brings a group of budding authors together with established pros for six weeks of intense work on the craft and business of being a science fiction writer. Like most educational programs these days, it always needs financial help.

So, to do my part, I'm committing to crank out the final 30K words of my novel-in-progress, Fist of the Ape. And if you'd like to support me — really, support all the fantasy and science fiction writers who benefit from Clarion — you can make a donation on my Write-a-Thon page.

I know it's a long way to June. Don't worry. I'll be sure to remind you :)

Resources
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My short story, "Umbrella Men" just sold to Fantasy & Science Fiction. Big thanks to my Gibraltar Point writing workshop colleagues Michael, Laurie, Becky, Liz, Dave, Janis, Steve, Rob, and Peter.

And, of course, to Jack, who gave me the first line, and Karen, always my first reader.

Editorial note: WOOT!

Spent the weekend at Lunacon, the New York Science Fiction Society convention at the Rye Town Hilton in Rye Brook, NY, and along with a thousand or so other NY sf types, had a fun time.

Hugo-nominee Lawrence M. Schoen was the Author Guest of Honor, and I heard him on a couple of panels, most notably, "Writing a First Chapter that Sells." He offered pointed examples of what not to do, including "locomotive prose" -- "He walked to the door. He turned the key. He opened the door." He also warned against starting a novel with a character just waking up in bed. "Unless the next line is, 'and next to him was a dead hooker.'" Regarding info dumps, that bane of first novel pages, he quoted Nancy Kress: "You have to earn your exposition."

Another high-point panel was a Friday-night session on "Time Travel in Movies and Television Shows" that touched on the usual suspects (Lost, BTTF, et. al.) but offered some interesting new titles to check out, like the film "Primer," and the novel "Days of Cain." (I'm a serious time travel afficionado; ymmv)

The "Borrowing from the Past" panel was another standout. Michael Swanwick talked about an epiphanic moment in Red Square to illustrate the value of travel as research, Michele Lang talked about the history of Budapest's palimpsest street names, and Esther Friesner provided a cautionary tale about too much research. Describing a story where a character had to hit a unicorn, she described an irate interaction with a horse-expert fan who argued that this would have broken the animal's leg. Pointing out that it was a mythical creature didn't help, and Friesner came to a simple conclusion about being willing to bend the facts. "Sometimes, you just have to hit the unicorn in the shins." Lang agreed, noting that "Story is boss." Friesner read from the disclaimer in her newest historical YA novel, "Threads and Flames," about the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire, where she explicitly notes that although she researched Ellis Island immigration procedures, she did not stick to them completely. (Yes, I got her to sign a copy; can't wait to read it.)

There was also a strong panel on Sunday, "Write What You Don't Know," about constructing fictions featuring or from the point of view of the Other. While all the panelists agreed on the value of research, beta readers, and a certain humbleness before the task of intersubjectivity, they also pointed out the importance of trying, given the overrepresentation of typical white/male/western culture. Yes, there will be shortfalls, but, as Laura Ann Gilman pointed out, "If you don't piss somebody off, you're not trying hard enough."

There was a Heinlein Society Blood drive (in memory of NY-area fan Michael Arthur Klotz) on Saturday, which was comfortable and efficient (didn't hear the final numbers, but it was busy when I stopped by) and a book raffle on Sunday to benefit the Wollheim scholarships for Clarion/Clarion West/Odyssey, which, given the number of tickets in the jar, looked like it raised several hundred dollars. (And I won the lot I was after, hardcovers of Connie Willis's "Blackout" and "All Clear." w00t!)

Overall, I had a good time, and the panels I saw were strong. There was, to be honest, some grousing about organization (panels did not have assigned moderators which led to some fumphering, and I heard panelists complain about getting their schedules late.) Scheduling was a bit loose as well (two of my panels had only half-a-dozen in the audience, as did several I attended) but personally, I feel that goes with the territory. My biggest complaint was the Hilton's exorbitant $12.50/day for "high speed internet" which I measured at 35k down and 20k up. Not even in America does that constitute "high speed," folks.

Full disclosure: I was the recipient of a 1993 scholarship to Clarion from the NY Science Fiction society.

I'll be at the 54th annual Lunacon in Rye Brook, NY this weekend, which promises to be a fun time, headlined by Hugo-nominee Lawrence M. Schoen and Artist GoH Rachael Mayo. There's a Masquerade (of course), a blood drive, and gaming, filking, and all fun stuff, and of course, they always have awesome sf folks.

They put me on a couple of cool panels, so if you're in the neighborhood, stop on by.

Classics of Sci-fi: Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land
Room:Med Friday 16:00-17:00

Writing Workshop
Rm:Westcester A1 Saturday 18:00-19:00

Using Social Networks to promote your writing
Rm:Odelle Saturday 19:00-20:00

Personal disclosure: The New York Science Fiction Society (aka, the Lunarians), which organizes Lunacon, gave me a partial scholarship to attend the Clarion writing workshop in 1993. I had quit my part-time tech job to attend Clarion, so having that money meant a great deal to me, and I've always wished I could do more to pay that forward; this year, at least I was able to work out my work schedule so I could attend. If you're a NY-area sf type, hope you will too.

If you're someone involved in writing science fiction or fantasy, you've probably heard of, and perhaps considered, the Clarion workshop, and this year's deadline is coming up on March 1.

The six-week workshop at UC San Diego runs from June 26-Aug 6 this year, and, as always, the lineup of writers-in-residence is absolutely stellar: Nina Kiriki Hoffman, John Scalzi, Elizabeth Bear, David Anthony Durham, John Kessel, and Kij Johnson. You'll spend your time immersed in the craft: writing, reading, critiquing, soaking up tacit knowledge, and building life-long connections.

Of course I'm biased, since I'm a Clarion grad (1993), but it is, quite literally, a transformative experience for a speculative fiction writer. Unless you are spectacularly lucky, you will never again have the opportunity to focus entirely on writing for such an extended period of time, in the company of such amazingly talented peers and coaches.

Clarion is not easy: writing a story a week is bloody hard work. The feedback evenings can be frightening, devastating, and exhilarating, sometimes all in the same session. And living as a writer, with writers, for six weeks can be a pressure cooker. Of the metamorphic variety.

It ain't always fun. But it will teach you things that cannot be learned any other way, things that will be invaluable in your writing career.

I sold two of the stories I wrote there, one of which won the Theodore Sturgeon Award; many folks from our group made pro sales.A bunch of our classmates are still friends, almost twenty years later, and several of us still get together to workshop every year.

If you're thinking about it, why not apply this year.

Not a writer? You can still support the future of speculative fiction by making a donation to the Clarion Foundation.

Editorial note: If you've been wondering why I haven't been covering Portsmouth stuff, I'm a bit under the weather. Literally. I did something to my back shoveling a week ago. I hate sounding like a whiny blogger, but people asked.

The just-concluded Arisia science fiction convention in Boston provided its usual eclectic mix of events and panels, with several new improvements that made the experience better than ever. (Not an sf fan? Just skip this post.)

First was the hotel: After the past couple of years at a somewhat smaller hotel, this year (and, according to the program, the next two) the venue was the Westin Waterfront. This is much more of a "convention" hotel, with expansive public spaces for coffee and conversation (and the setups for grabbing a quick sandwich on all three floors were very handy). The Art Show and Dealers Room now had a full function space, and the only time I experienced elevator overcrowding was on checkout morning.

Sorry to lead with the space rather than the content, but it really made a huge difference.

The panels, as usual, were excellent, with what I inferred was a deliberate mix of seasoned experts, neo-folks, and fan voices on most of the literature and media sessions. Also new this year, the standard length was increased to 75 minutes with a 15-minute gap, which provided more breathing room as well as some time to navigate the new hotel's larger space.

They put me on all 8 panels that I indicated interest in, so I spent most of the weekend cramming and only got to a couple that I wasn't actually *on.*

Did two on Friday, a very thoughtful discussion of Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land," with great audience interaction. I'm not sure we came up with any new perspectives, but we chewed it over and grokked it thoroughly. There was a late-night panel (one of those 11pm items that can go either way) on the Future of School, and it was great. The panelists brought a range of perspectives, from a home-schooling dad, an ELA teacher, and online course designer, and an educational psychologist. Probably the key insight that emerged from the discussion was seeing the formalization of "many kinds of minds" and social learning instruction as frontiers as much as educational technology. For an sf crowd, there was a pretty strong awareness of the limitations of just talking about tech.

Then at midnight, I had to go see the Tesseracte players do their shadowcast of "Rocky Horror." Every once in a while, it's fun to sit in the dark and yell stuff.

Saturday morning, I saw an excellent panel on science fiction and fantasy (sf/f) manga, and scribbled down a boatload of suggestions. Karen and Jack came up and we got him into the "Fast Track" kids programming (which was, as always outstanding) and I took in an early afternoon session on editor John W. Campbell's influence. Ian Randal Strock provided the "insider" perspective as someone who had worked at Analog (though after Campbell), and Catherynne Valente offered an ascerbic counterpoint.

Late afternoon, I was on a fascinating panel on sf/f as the modern myth, where we talked about everthing from Joseph Campbell to comics to Mythbusters, with two intertwining threads of folklore and fantasy and the roots of myth in our existential predicament (you can probably figure out which thread I kept tugging on...)

Saturday evening was an AWESOME panel on imaginary texts as critical and artistic tools. Catherynne Valente talked about her work, Valerie Grimm made linkages to interactive fiction, Adam Lipkin brought a deep publishing perspective, and Adam Nakama had the game angle. Yes, we talked about Borges, and the Necronomicon, and William Ashbless, and I even snuck in "The Courier's Tragedy." General consensus on the importance of creating the world of alternate possibility and making it real (sometimes to the point where the imaginary book ends up getting written.)

While I was doing the panel, Karen took Jack to his first Masquerade (fan-created-costume show and judging, for those unfamilar) and they got there early enough to snag first-row seats. They both had a blast, by all accounts, and Jack came back sporting a handful of origami demon claws.

Sunday morning, I took in an excellent panel on steam technology, proposed by fellow Aquidneck Islander James Hinsey, who provided deep practical experience from the Navy perspective, along with a couple of other engineers who brought fanatical expertise. I really love this kind of tech panel. Even though I don't write steampunk, I just dig the history of technology.

Spent the morning prepping for Language and Linguistics in Genre Fiction, and glad I did. What an amazing group: Lauren Burka, Tananarive Due, Greer Gilman, and Sonya Taaffe. We covered everything from the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the difficulties of translation, the absence of erotic registers in English, to the challenge of representing speech. Taaffee was lamenting the stereotyped sentence structure some writers fall into when attempting to capture the sound of someone who has not quite mastered English. "I can haz dialect?" I suggested, which made it into the conference Twitter stream and, I think, might just have led Taaffe to forgive me for mixing Akkadian and Sumerian in "The Ashbazu Effect."

I moderated a James Cameron retrospective, which had a strong group of panelists (Richard Ralston, Santiago Rivas, and Boston movie critic and all-night sci-fi movie maven Garen Daly).

The 5pm panel on Metropolis was another awesome group: Justin Graykin, Sonya Taaffe, Eric Van, and Frank Wu. The first hand from the audience wasn't a question, but the observation that we all were completely lit up just talking about the new restoration. And, I'll admit, yeah, we were. We yammered about how totally jaw-droppingly spectacular it was for the full 75 minutes. If you haven't seen it, go, do. The movie makes *sense* now.

I stopped by Fast Track to watch an apocalyptically huge Nerf gun battle, which I suspect Jack might have enjoyed just a little bit.

The late-night panel on Sunday, SF as the Literature of Things, would have been a fascinating discussion, but with no one in in the audience, we decided it didn't even meet the criterion for adjourning to the bar.

This morning, I caught one final panel on forgotten favorites of sf literature, which reminded me to go back and re-read Keith Laumer, Cordwainer Smith, and Lord Dunsany. On the panel were two smart sf types who call Rhode Island home: Vikki Ciaffone and Peter Maranci, and we traded used bookstore recommendations.

Bottom line: They kept all the good stuff about the con, and added more elbow room and more relaxed scheduling. Massive win.

If you're not a science fiction fan, just skip this post. If you're the con-going type, you may want to head up to Arisia in Boston this weekend. Arisia offers an eclectic mix of media, literature, gaming, live events, and filk. It's in a great new hotel, the Westin Waterfront, which promises to make it even better this year. Here's my schedule.

50th Anniversary of Stranger in a Strange Land Fri 5:00 PM
2011 marks the 50th anniversary of Heinlein's Hugo-Award-winning work Stranger in a Strange Land. Containing the inspirations for both the water bed and a real life Church of All Worlds, what other influences has the novel had on genre literature and popular culture? Often cited as a commentary on social mores of the time, what message was Heinlein trying to convey? Come discuss the novel, its origins, and influences on other works.

The Future of School Fri 11:00 PM
Science fiction writers have often written about changes that technology might make to education, from the students' "desks" in Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game to R.A. Heinlein's observations and critiques of education in his juvenile fiction. What kinds of alternate education exist now? How does emerging technology affect the learners of tomorrow? Will school still get out for summer?

SF and Fantasy as the Modern Myth Sat 5:00 PM
John Campbell, Joseph Campbell, Tolkien, and George Lucas: What is the role of myth in F&SF, and F&SF in myth? Does the ubiquity of SF's tropes in society support the thesis that SF is our modern myth? And, if not, what is?

Imaginary Texts as Critical and Artistic Tools Sat 9:30 PM
Writers as diverse as H.P. Lovecraft, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Jorge Luis Borges have invented imaginary texts for a variety of literary and socially contextualized reasons, from the Necronomicon, to the Sonnets from the Portuguese, to The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim. What does engaging with invented texts allow us to do in the way of critical discourse and social commentary? How do we read and contextualize them differently from more traditional works?

Language and Linguistics in Genre Fiction Sun 12:30 PM
There's more to language than a dictionary and grammar, as these experts will tell you. Whether written, spoken, or signed, languages grow out of specific cultural settings and specific neurologies, and affect those cultures and neurologies. The ways that languages affect minds and societies, and what we can learn from a culture's language, are fertile fields for research, discussion, and cool ideas.

James Cameron Retrospective Sun 2:00 PM
Having consistently brought good genre films to the screen (Terminator, Aliens, The Abyss, Avatar), what's next? What themes recur in his works? What messages and narratives does he revisit? Do his films celebrate his influences or rip them off?

Metropolis: The Complete Film Sun 5:00 PM
Fritz Lang's 1927 masterpiece of cinema has finally been restored to completion. How does seeing the full version change our understanding of this landmark SF movie? In what ways does it continue to influence the genre?

SF as the Literature of Things Sun 11:00 PM
The works of Gibson, Doctorow, and Sterling, among others, posit that the future will be built bottom-up rather than top-down; that progress derives not from the implementation of ideas but rather from the accumulation of technological change. Character in these works is a product of our interaction with things, things produced as fast as we can. Is this ultimately just an interesting sub-genre, or might (or should) the field itself be morphing in this direction?

Yesterday was the first time in a week anybody in our house felt like human beings — we've all had this "7-day" virus that's been going around —so it was great to get out of the house with Jack to see Tron Legacy.

Top-line review: wicked awesome. What struck me most was the way the film did not "talk down" on the technical stuff, either IRL or on the Grid. You probably know the plot: genius game designer Kevin Flynn vanishes into the cyberspace of his creation; years later, his son Sam follows him in, action ensues. There's a sequence where Sam is attempting to hack into his dad's system, and instead of the typical Hollywood "computer screens" you see in movies, you get a fairly reasonable series of unix command lines and output. There's a brilliant beat where Sam contemplates a critical dialog box, and his facial expression as he makes a selection is spot-on. It's a small moment, but it is deeply authentic.

And the intertextual references inside the Grid are delightful and complex. In addition to the War Games throwaway line, there are visual homages to The Matrix, Bladerunner, and The Fifth Element. Oh, and Shakespeare. Maybe it's just because I'm a total Tempest fanboy, but I found it hard not to read Kevin Flynn as Prospero and Quorra as comprising Miranda and Ariel. You can also read the film in interesting ways against Metropolis, which was, after all, the first significant movie featuring artificial life (leaving aside, for a moment, the 1920 Golem.) Without spoilers, anyone watching both films will find thematic similarities in the characters and the resolution.

It's energizing to see good sf on the screen. On the home front, I recently put the finishing touches on "Umbrella Men," a 9,000-word sf story which will go out for submission shortly, and I've spent the last couple of days working on a companion web site. This is the first project where I've seen the opportunity to create an "artifactual fiction" component, and it's been a lot of fun. I'll post links as soon as I sell this puppy.

And whilst on the topic of science fiction, I got my schedule for Arisia, which is the awesome sf convention in Boston coming up in January. It's the only con that I try to do every year, and it's a really great mix of print, media, gaming, anime, and general weird fun. They put me on every panel that I asked for, so I've got 8 slots over three days, including a discussion of the 50th anniversary of Stranger in a Strange Land, a James Cameron retrospective, and one on the future of school.(There just might be a few folks in Boston passionate about education... :)

I'll post the full schedule after the holidays.

Science fiction writer and BoingBoing blogger Cory Doctorow has long been a proponent of digital distribution and a relentless opponent of overly restrictive licensing and non-value-adding intermediaries. While his books bear the imprint of major publishers, he also releases them on the Web for free. So the distribution strategy for his latest project, With a Little Help, is really just a natural extension of his approach, and yet, it also marks an interesting departure: this time, he's creating a range of physical and digital versions, with different production values and price points. Oh, and part of the text will be a balance sheet to inform discussions around digital/self-publication. Here's how Cory explains it:

With a Little Help is my first serious experiment in self-publishing. I've published many novels, short story collections, books of essays and so on with publishers, and it's all been very good and satisfying and educational and so on, but it seems like it's time to try something new.

You see, I've always released my work under open licenses from the Creative Commons project, so that my readers could share and remix my works. A good number of these readers wanted to know why I didn't distribute the physical book as well, and see what a writer working on his own could do.

So here you have it. *With a Little Help,* consists of 12 stories, all reprints except for "Epoch," which was commissioned by the Ubuntu project's Mark Shuttleworth for $10,000 (this being the most expensive option for buying the book -- don't worry, there are cheaper editions).

You can get a paperback version from Lulu.com for $18 (and every month, Doctorow will add a new appendix with the latest balance sheet.) There will be a $275 limited-edition collector's hardcover, with high-end printing and original paper ephemera donated by various sf writers. An audiobook version is available for about ten bucks, with the stories read by folks including Neil Gaiman, Wil Wheaton, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Jonathan Coulton, and Spider Robinson.

Or, as always, you can surf on over to the With a Little Help page on his web site and download the whole thing for free, under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. You can also find links to all the other versions on the site.

It features an introduction by Jonathan Coulton, as well as a very interesting afterword on digital publishing by Doctorow's agent, Russell Galen. In addition to the stories which, of course, kick ass. Check it out.

Full disclosure: I have had the privilege of workshopping with Cory.