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Hi all, I attended four climate change sessions at Aussiecon 4, two of them I wrote about in my last Aussiecon post. Designer Planet: Averting Climate Change with Geoengineering . This session was conducted solo by science fiction author Gregory Benford . He is also an astrophysicist in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, Irvine . I have read a number of his novels including the excellent 1980 Nebula Award winner Timescape . During the talk he gave out his email address so people could request further information, I did so. He emailed back a number of articles including two which comprised much of what he said during his talk, and an excellent article Prozac for the Planet by Christopher Cokinos , about a geoengineering conference which he attended. Gregory Benford started by telling us that greenhouse gases make up 388 parts per million of the atmosphere, and that is increasing by 3ppm per year. (Currently world attempts focus on k...

Hi all, I was reading a blog post by Joe Konrath who has written a book called the Newbie's Guide to Publishing and has a blog of the same name (he also has five or so novels in a detective thriller series). He makes a good argument from the author's side for charging $2.99 for an ebook, but I am not so sure about his argument from the consumers side. You can argue all you like about what price a consumer is willing to pay and what price ebooks will eventually be, but those arguments have to be backed up with what is happening in the publishing world. People who have read some of my blog posts and comments on other people's blogs about ebooks would know that I am not very hopeful about the short term future of the publishing industry. They would also know that I reckon the price of the average ebook in the near future will be zero. People who read this blog would also know that about once a month I visit Amazon's bestselling Kindle ebook list to see what ...

Hi all, I attended four panels on climate change at Aussiecon. Kim Stanley Robinson appeared on three of them. He appeared to be a committed environmentalist who hopes that humanity, and Americans in particular, will change their behaviour to solve the problems of climate change. I personally don't have that much faith in our solving of climate change, due to a misleading media run by greedy billionaires who could care less about the world when they are dead. I think we will only start to act when it is too late. A lot of people forget, or don't know, that greenhouse gases we are pumping out today, will stay in the atmosphere for centuries, so when climate change is at its worst, it will stay that way for centuries. That is unless science comes up with an answer. A lot of people hope science will come up with an answer. One of the panels questioned this hope, another provided this hope. Destroying the Future to Save the Planet : The Environmental Politics of SF/F . The paneli...

Hi all, Lots of news this week. First, Divine online magazine sent me a contract for a article a month for the next 12 months. The pay rate is quite good, so I had no hesitation in signing and returning the contract. They then contacted me about the training day on 8 th of October, offering me accommodation for the night before and night after, which I gratefully accepted. A couple of weeks ago they sent me an email suggesting I write an article that introduced myself. I wrote that last week, concentrating on my interest in science fiction. I included a mention of Aussiecon 4, and in particular the panels on global warming. Hopefully this article will be accepted as my first paying assignment for the magazine. I already have two sample articles up on their website. I sent an email to Gregory Benford requesting more information about his talk of geo -engineering the Arctic as a stop-gap measure to give us more time to reduce greenhouse gases. He gracious sent me back ...

Hi all, At Aussiecon 4 I attended three panels specifically targeted at writers of young adult fiction. Border Crossing: YA Authors Writing for Adults. Panelists: Cory Doctorow (Canadian sci-fi novelist), Alison Goodman (Australian fantasy novelist) Marianne De Pierres (Australian sci-fi novelist) and Bec Kavanagh as moderator It seems that whether a book is classified as YA or adult is very much up to the publisher with Cory having the same novel rejected by a YA bookseller in one country and published as adult, but published as YA in another country. They said you have to write at a different level of assumed knowledge for the YA reader, but Cory wrote with google in mind: if a teenager wanted to know more about something he could just look it up. Cory makes his young people in the novels sound intelligent as the readership is aspirational and wanting to be intelligent. He reckons kids are a lot older now than we remember them being, more critical and articulate. The pan...

Hi all, I caught a cold at Aussiecon : my brain must have been too busy processing information from the 18 panels I attended to direct my immune system. I tried to write this post yesterday, but my brain was too busy directing my immune system to stop me accidentally deleting it half way through. I have divided the panels I attended at Aussiecon be divided into five categories: 1. Writing Young Adult Fiction Including the following sessions: Border Crossing: YA Authors Writing for Adults Wrought From the Very Living Rock: World Building in YA Fiction Nuts and Bolts: Editing YA Fiction 2. Climate Change: Destroying the Future to Save the Planet: The Environmental Politics of SFF Geoengineering Climate Change and Utopia Climate Change: Possible Futures for Planet Earth 3. Speculative Fiction Markets What we Publish How to Market Short Stories The Future of Short Fiction 4. The Digital Revolution Copyright in the 21st Century Did the Future Just Arrive - ebooks 5. The Future The Fut...

Hi all, Well I survived Aussiecon . I spent most of my time attending panels as well as the opening ceremony and the guest of honour speeches. I also spent a bit of time in the dealers room searching for books. There was so much to see and listen to. The panel sessions I saw were mainly on science fiction, writing for young adults, editing and climate change. A lot of those panels included the guest of honour, Kim Stanley Robinson. I had read his novel Red Mars and, after finding he had a great concern for climate change, I will now finish reading the series. He said the series was not so much about terraforming Mars but an allegory about man's treatment of Earth. I also saw Canadian author Cory Doctorow with his uncomfortable arguments about where the publishing is heading. He is a fan, if not major contributor, to the digital revolution, running the well patronised website Boing Boing . He has also been nominated for three Hugos for mainly young adult science fi...