Blog 

Mad Scientist podcast and other recent publications

You can hear me reading “Letter to the Editor,” my story from The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, on the latest Tales to Terrify podcast!
http://talestoterrify.com/tales-to-terrify-show-no-65-joe-r-lansdale-david-d-levine/

Also, my story “Wavefronts of History and Memory” is in the June 2013 Analog, on sale now, and I have just received my author copies of the new UK edition of the first Wild Cards volume.

ETA: Forgot to mention that “Wavefronts of History and Memory” has already been reviewed by Lois Tilton (“Readers might suspect the story to culminate with a shocking historical revelation. But Levine is more subtle. As the revelation hovers silently in readers’ minds, he employs its ghostly presence to reflect a more personal revelation about self-knowledge”), and I got a fan letter on the story from Bud Sparhawk!

Taos Toolbox

The Taos Toolbox writers’ workshop, a two-week Master Class in Science Fiction and Fantasy taught by Walter Jon Williams, Nancy Kress, and Melinda Snodgrass, will be held July 28-August 10, 2013 at a lovely lodge in the mountains above Taos, NM. There’s still room for a few more writers and I encourage anyone looking to take their fiction to the next level to apply. http://www.taostoolbox.com/

My Norwescon schedule

This coming weekend is Norwescon, in Sea-Tac, Washington. This is the first Norwescon I’ve attended in five or ten years; we’ll see how it’s changed while I’ve been away.

I’ll be on the following program items:

Friday 10:00 AM, Cascade 8: When Things Go Wrong In Space.
Apollo 13 was not the first time things went wrong in spaceflight, it won’t be the last. How do scientists and engineers anticipate problems and train to solve them? Furthermore, can the same ideas be used for more mundane, down to Earth problems?
David D. Levine (M), Dan Dubrick, David Shoemaker

Friday 3:00 PM, Cascade 7: Best New Technologies for the Start-up Mad Scientist
Saving the world is good, but taking over the world is even better! What field should the up-and-coming mad scientist get into on their path to unlimited power or enough money to get some really cool toys?
David D. Levine (M), Chris Nilsson, David Nasset, Sr., Dr. Ricky

Friday 4:00 PM, Cascade 2: Grimm and Once Upon a Time
Fairy tales are definitely in style and definitely grown up.
David D. Levine (M), Chelsea M. Campbell, Dan Murphy, Lola Colleen, Janet Borkowski

Saturday 4:00 PM, Cascade 3&4: Can Social Media SAVE THE WORLD?
The phrase “Social Media revolution” didn’t originally mean “overthrow your government via Twitter”, but what can you do? Social media can be used to bring together a flash crowd for political action, but can it help build good, or just discomfort bad? Can social media help make the world a better place by doing something more than providing an infinite supply of cute cat pictures?
David D. Levine (M), Bob Kruger, Fish, Jonny Nero Action Hero, Andri Snaer Magnason

Saturday 5:00 PM, Cascade 1: David D. Levine reads “Letter to the Editor”
You think you know who Dr. Talon is. “Mad Scientist.” “Criminal Genius.” But in this Letter to the Editor, Dr. Talon reveals his true motivations. Rated G
David D. Levine

Sunday 10:00 AM, Cascade 6: Fantasy Houses with SF Furniture in Them
If there’s magic in it, the book is fantasy, right? But what if the magical power is on tap like water and you pay a monthly bill to the city magic utility, as in Walter John Williams’ Metropolitan? What if magic is described, studied, and practiced in the language of physics and software, as in Charles Stross’ The Atrocity Archives? Is this a new genre, a hybrid genre, or still just fantasy? And where does Steampunk fit in?
Clinton J. Boomer (M), David D. Levine, Rhiannon Held

I’ll also be conducting a writers’ workshop session, showing up at the bar and various parties, and just generally hanging out. Hope to see you there!

Launch Pad 2013 applications now open

In 2008 I attended the Launch Pad astronomy workshop. Applications are now open for this year’s workshop, which will be held July 14-21, 2013.

Launch Pad is a week-long crash course for modern astronomy held annually in Laramie, Wyoming, and combines traditional lecture, experiment, activities, discussion, and telescope visits. It’s basically a full semester of Astronomy 101 in a week, and it will melt your brain.

Attendance is limited to about a dozen participants, who are selected based on audience size and audience diversity. That’s a fancy way of saying they don’t just admit a dozen white male hard sf novelists who write for pretty much the same audience. They would love to see more applications from writers of all genres, non-fiction writers, screenwriters, playwrights, editors and anyone with the ability to put more and better quality astronomy in front of interested eyes, although they expect many participants to continue to be science fiction novelists as they have dominated the applicant pool. The workshop used to be free, but they’ve lost their NASA/NSF funding so it now costs $500 — this includes tuition, lodging, and meals except for dinner.

The application form, more information about the workshop, a history, and my write-up of the workshop at tor.com are available online. Applications will be open until April 15 and final decisions should be made by mid-May.

I had a blast when I went, and I encourage any SF writer with an interest in space to apply.

Mad Science, FOGcon, and more

Last night’s Mad Scientist’s Guide reading at Powell’s went well, with an enthusiastic crowd of about 50 attendees.

IMG 1702

I was remarkably blasé about the whole thing, really… I had two other people to back me up, and all I had to do was read a story, one I’ve read before and I know goes over well, and do a bit of Q&A. But still — I had a reading at Powell’s! And at the end of the evening I went home with the large foam-core version of the book cover, which is something I’ve never had before. Very cool.

In other mad-science-related news, I have just sold a reprint of my BVC Mad Scientist Week story “One Night in O’Shaughnessy’s Bar” to Mad Scientist Journal. Mad Scientist Journal has also reviewed The Mad Scientist’s Guide, calling “Letter to the Editor” “my favorite story of the anthology”.

I have also just learned that Heiresses of Russ 2012: the Year’s Best Lesbian Speculative Fiction, which includes my story “Tides of the Heart,” is a finalist for a Lambda Award!

Tomorrow morning we will be heading down to the Bay Area for FOGcon, where I will be on the panel “Better Stories and Gardens” at 4:30 Friday.

I was also supposed to appear on a bunch of programming on Saturday, but I am going to have to bail on all of it because my aunt passed away a couple of weeks ago and her life celebration is on Saturday afternoon in Sacramento.

(Condolences, although appreciated, are unnecessary; my aunt was a wonderful person, but I did not know her well and she passed away peacefully at age 87.)

The good news is that, as the life celebration and the con are both in the Bay Area, I don’t have to miss the entire con, just Saturday afternoon/evening. So if you are at the con, I hope to see you there!

Mark your calendars (Portland, OR)

Here are a few upcoming events that might be of interest to the Portland-area SF-reading crowd:

Tuesday, March 5, 2013, 7:00 PM: The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination reading/signing with John Joseph Adams, Daniel H. Wilson, and David D. Levine at Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing (http://www.powells.com/events/#5113)

Thursday, April 4, 2013, 7:00 PM: Phantom Sense and Other Stories book launch with Mark Niemann-Ross, Richard A. Lovett, and David D. Levine at St. Johns Booksellers (http://stjohnsbooks.com)

Wednesday, April 24, 2103, 7:00 PM: SFWA Pacific Northwest Reading Series with Mary Robinette Kowal, Tina Connolly, and Nisi Shawl at McMenamin’s Kennedy School (http://www.sfwa.org/for-readers/sfwa-northwest-reading-series/)

Portland Comic Con report

I had thought that I’d never been to a comics event before, but when I ran into Barry Deutsch he pointed out that I’d been to several iterations of the Stumptown Comics Fest. Which is true, but Stumptown is more of an arts festival, where most of the tables are staffed by independent comics artists. The Wizard World Comic Con was not very much like that at all.

My first thought when I stepped onto the show floor was that this looked and felt exactly like the “sci-fi conventions” seen on shows such as Castle and CSI — masses of people, mostly dressed in black, with a sprinkling of costumes, all tightly packed in a show floor crammed with booths. Lots of T-shirts with geeky slogans; mass-produced zap guns and other accessories. Quite a few small children, with parents in tow (or is that the other way around). Pop music from the overhead speakers competing with video game noises and soundtracks from the booths. Thousands of people, possibly over ten thousand; certainly all the parking near the convention center was full. This was a place of commerce — a giant dealer’s room with a few tracks of programming attached (on the other side of the hall, more lightly attended). Apart from Barry (whom I’ve met only a few times before) and the other panelists on my own panel, out of all those thousands I didn’t meet a single other person I knew.

But as I wandered the show floor, looking at pirated DVDs and buying some graphic novels from the 50% off racks, I realized that there was something else this reminded me of: the state fair. Like the state fair, it had booth after booth of vendors and exhibitors; it even had games of chance (I won a T-shirt) and pitchmen hawking the geekish equivalent of Veg-A-Matics (mostly iPhone accessories). Instead of cows and horses, it had artists and actors. Brent Spiner and Lou Ferrigno chewed their cud in their stalls, signing autographs for $40 a pop and up. Artists, too, were had stalls, selling books, prints, and sketches (I’d been told that some would provide sketches for free; I didn’t ask, but saw several with posted price lists). I saw an enormous line, stretching the length of the exhibit hall, of people waiting for an autograph from one of the stars of The Walking Dead, which sort of baffled me. All it lacked was elephant ears and Fried Things on Sticks, though the convention center’s usual providers of unhealthy food were on hand.

Crossing the hall to the programming area, I sat in on a few panels, including a presentation on the history of Filmation by Andy Mangels, before it was time for my own panel (“Science Fiction Writers: Imagining Our Future” with Erik Wecks, William Hertling, Daniel H. Wilson, and Chris Claremont). Over a hundred people attended, and I think most of them were drawn by the name Chris Claremont… but he didn’t show, and didn’t show, and finally we started the panel without him. Then, about fifteen minutes in, someone from the convention came in and removed his name tent, muttering to the panelists “he’s not on this panel.” (::waves hands:: “I am not here. I was never here.”) Later we learned that Claremont had not been informed of his addition to the panel, though he was listed in the program book. However, even when it became clear that the star would not show, not one audience member left, which cheered me greatly.

It was a perfectly respectable panel; we covered the basics, with special attention to robots and AI due to the specialties of Wilson and Hertling, and fielded several questions from the polite but engaged audience. I handed out a few business cards and then left for another engagement.

So that was yesterday. Am I going back today? Probably… I must confess I am interested in the presentations by Morena Baccarin and James Marsters. Would I go again? Maybe, if I’m invited again, but I don’t think I’d pay $60, plus parking, for the weekend.