Welcome to part three of a rambling email-based discussion of Iain M Banks’ Matter between Niall “Vector” Harrison, Jonathan “SF Diplomat” McCalmont, James “Big Dumb Object” Bloomer and myself.

Make sure you check out parts one [does it Matter to you?] and two [mind over Matter], else you may find yourself a little lost. And if you’re the sort of person who gets twitchy about spoilers, I’d best warn you that [pirate voice]‘ere be many spoilers, me hearties[/pirate voice].

[ For the sake of context it may be worth pointing out that "the interview" we keep mentioning was the BSFA event where Farah Mendlesohn interviewed Banks ... which was a fascinating insight into Banks as a person, but somewhat obfuscatory from the perspective of attempting to actually get beneath the skin of the man's books. ]

I’m particularly proud of my conjectural thematic sandcastle that I build at the end. If anyone who’s read Matter would like to tell me that they can vaguely comprehend how I might possibly have conceived of that idea, that’s be just great. That said, calling me a nutcase is probably the easier option. YMMV.

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Paul: By my calculations, my tardy response signals the requirement for another question, so I’ll step up to the plate with:

What did Matter say to you? What was the theme, as perceived by you as reader, and how was that theme expressed at various levels?

Jonathan: To me Matter is a book about social class.

This operates on two levels. Firstly, on an individual level we have the sense of class that drips from Hausk’s children as a result of their childhood educations: Ferbin as the Diplomat and Orumen as the Scholar. They’re also loaded. Their lives are completely alien to those of other individuals from their own culture who have to try and pull together a living. What is interesting about this portrayal of class is that while we are told that the Empire of Hausk the conqueror is something he created in his lifetime, the society is already showing signs of being hide-bound, with clueless upper class generals and spoiled rich kids playing at being knights while the actual business of fighting a war takes place thousands and thousands of kilometers away. It’s a very fast progression.

The second level on which Matter’s depiction of social class operates is on the civilisational level. In Excession, and arguably even way back in Consider Phlebas, we saw that the Culture universe has always had quite a strict pecking order with some civilisations being clearly less developed — both morally and technologically — than others. Banks has flirted with the idea that this hierarchy exists purely in the minds (and Minds) of the Culture, who are endlessly smug in their moral certainty. However, Matter suggests that social class also affects galactic civilisation: Elder civilisations sit back while younger and less advanced cultures desperately scrabble for position and patronage, in a manner reminiscent of Ferbin’s servant.

The end result is one of complex social stratification and a very clearly defined status quo, almost reminiscent of that present in many of the more romantic works of the fantasy genre; we even have a Big Bad whose ultimate motivations are never really discussed but who we know is bad because he threatens the status quo in a most destructive manner.

Niall: “Clearly defined status quo” – Yes. As you say, hierarchy is the key to Matter. I liked how a character’s position in that hierarchy influenced how they interpreted, well, just about anything. Anaplian, for instance, considering her father’s career from her Cultured perspective, finds herself unimpressed, thinking of him as “just another strong man, in one of those societies, at one of those stages, in which it was easier to be the strong man than it was to be truly courageous”. Moreover, to her, the development of societies through such stages is “as natural and obvious as the progression of a star along the main Sequence, or evolution itself”. (How to make history interesting to sf readers: compare it to stellar physics.) But equally, it’s made clear that the leaders of Sarl – both Hausk, and tyl Loesp after him – know exactly where they sit on the great galactic ladder, and unsurprisingly resent it more than a little. So they seize what opportunities the societies they perceive as higher offer them (indeed that’s how Anaplian came to be given to the Culture in the first place – in exchange for ideas that are slowly kick-starting an industrial revolution on the Eighth) in pursuit of a “glitteringly pragmatic future”. I think there’s even a moment when tyl Loesp thinks to himself that he hopes such brutality as defines his life will become obsolete. (Which makes him so much more satisfying as an antagonist than the straightforwardly evil Luseferous in The Algebraist. But maybe I’ve beaten that drum enough.) To achieve that goal he’s willing to allow himself and his people to be used quite nakedly. Paul, I believe this is your cue to mention postcolonialism.

Anyway, all of that means that I would say that intertwined with class, and as important to the book, is the question of what freedom means. There are characters like Oramen, who are obviously not free and characters like Anaplian, who in theory are ultimately free, but in reality are constrained in subtle ways. Oramen puts it this way: “while [inhabitants of Optimae civilizations] had what appeared to be complete freedom within their societies, the societies themselves had very little freedom of movement at all. […] There was simply not much left for them to do on any grand scale.” One of the things that made me warm to Oramen, in fact, is the way he was able to come to these realizations without (unlike Ferbin) being beaten over the head by grand revelations … meanwhile, Anaplian is wrestling with the fact that interventions that on the face of it will relieve oppression will actually “subtly, incrementally but most certainly remove all freedom and dignity from the very people one sought only to help”. If you like, it all comes down to this speech that Shoum gives, when Ferbin finally finds him:

“You find yourself the unintended victim of a system set up specifically to benefit people like the Sarl, prince; a system which has evolved over the centieons to ensure that peoples less technologically advanced than others are able to progress as naturally as possible within a generally controlled galactic environment, allowing societies at profoundly different civilisational stages to rub up against each other without this leading to the accidental destruction of demoralisation of the less developed participants. It is a system that has worked well for a long time; however, that does not mean it never produces anomalies or seeming injustices. I am most sorry.”

All the Culture novels are, in some sense, Omelas problems – what is the cost of maintaining utopia? What Matter does most satisfyingly is attack this question (or this sort of question – what is the cost of achieving and maintaining civilization) in a setting that is politically intricate and resonant with our own history, while keeping alive the sense that it is a grand and important and universal question. It investigates specifics without getting lost in those specifics.

James: I thought there was going to be some “going on a journey” theme/message, but apart from the fact that everybody went somewhere (and some came back) I don’t think that very much can be made of it.

The Galactic hierarchy left me thinking that if I had to live anywhere in that universe it would have to be in the midst of the Culture, minding my own business and living the high life. Why would anyone bother working for Special Circumstances? Even if you had to join SC to get “into” The Culture, why not then leave and take it easy? I don’t think any of the SC operatives’ motives convince me. Having said that, the person at the bottom of the pile, and not Culture, is the one who survives, but maybe more by luck than anything else.

Jonathan: That’s actually an interesting point. It occurred to me a while back that ideology seems to have drained out of SF. Heinlein’s works may have essentially became fora in which he could appear as an appropriately father-like Mary Sue and then mouth off about whatever political issue was getting his goat at the time, but I think that nowadays genre is struggling to keep in touch with the idea of people being genuinely politically motivated.

The Culture books are weird in that they’re frequently political but the politics aren’t particularly fine-grained. The result is that you have characters working for SC out of a genuine desire to further the political aims of SC but as those aims are frequently unclear, the politics serve quite poorly as character motivation, merely resulting in lots of people being enigmatic and secretive.

I think that type of writing works in morally simplistic universes as characters can be secretive, enigmatic, maybe a bit ambiguous but ultimately good. Once you remove that easy moral safety net and you have to deal with real issues that motivate real people, it becomes a lot more tricky to make it convincing.

Paul: OK, the theme of Matter. Well, the clue is in the title, and even gets referenced quite explicitly a little over half way through [page 340 or so in my ARC]. Ferbin and Holse are talking to Hyrlis about surveillance, reality, truth and the Simulation Hypothesis (though not in those terms, natch). Ferbin (true to form) ignores the revelations, but Holse has the instinctive grasp, and so Banks feeds us the core of the theme through Hyrlis to Holse and out onto the page.

“If we assume that all we have been told is as real as what we ourselves experience – in other words, that history, with all its torturings, massacres and genocides, is true – then, if it is all under the control of somebody or some thing, must not those running that simulation be monsters? How utterly devoid of decency, pity, and compassion would they have to be to allow this to happen, and keep on happening under their explicit control? Because so much of history is precisely this, gentlemen.”
[...]
“War, famine, disease, genocide. Death in a million different forms, often painful and protracted for the poor individual wretches involved. What god would so arrange the universe to predispose its creations to experience such suffering, or be the cause of it in others? What master of simulations or arbiter of a game would set up the initial conditions to such pitiless effect? God or programmer, the charge would be the same: that of near-infinitely sadistic cruelty; deliberate, premeditated barbarism on an unspeakably horrific scale.
[...]
Just as reality can blithely exhibit the most absurd coincidences that no credible fiction could convince us of, so only reality – produced, ultimately, by matter in the raw – can be so unthinkingly cruel. Nothing able to think [...] could encompass such purposefully envoked savagery without representing the absolute definition of evil. It is that unthinkingness which saves us. And condemns us, too, of course; we are as a result our own moral agents, and there is no escape from that responsibility.”

The theme is certainly connected to hierarchy, but the human hierarchies are mirroring the bigger one – the hierarchy of truths, of actualities.

Now the problem is that I can’t put this into words very well, because it was one of those revelatory things that rolled on in from the sidelines while I was reading the passage in question. I suppose the best way of grasping toward the feeling it produces when I think is to talk about Russian dolls of reality – not stacked universes or dimensions or anything (though they, again, mirror the same thing) but realities as perceived by players within them.

(Banks’ love of games manifests here as well – I think he’s saying that ultimately life, consciousness, sentience etc is a game that the universe plays with itself (like an only child, perhaps?). Complexity increases as we move toward entropy and heat death; as energy coalesces into matter. Matter is an emergent form of complexity – maybe Einstein’s God doesn’t play dice with the universe, but there’s evidence that the universe isn’t averse to rolling for snake-eyes while it waits for the bus. But I digress.)

Those perceived realities have the added complication of intersecting in time and space – they are conceptual territories that share space-time with the territories of others, and so matter goes to war with matter, over matter …

I’m not explaining this well, am I? I really need to read the whole thing again with an eye for the clues and intrusions of this theme (just in case I have in fact invented the thing out of whole cloth without realising it). But I think it was more obvious because I’d been utterly buried in Brasyl prior to reading Matter, which uses a similar idea in different ways.

In short, I’m saying something like Jonathan, but I see the layering of perceived realities reaching out way beyond notions of class and civilisation, and into the way everything interacts. The class thing is just one facet, one expression of the overarching principle. From the mighty empires, transcended races and Cultures and so on, right down to ticks on horses, and chemical reactions. The WorldGod is, to Ferbin, a god. To Hyrlis, it’s just an unhinged and inscrutable member of a mostly transcended elder race. Same corporeal entity, different things to different people – and the way they see it is a function of the reality they perceive.

This is why the Shellworld is such a great set-piece. It’s not just an awesome sensawunda BDO, but a mirror of the bigger idea – nested realities, each with their own ecology of sentience that makes no sense to someone or something at a different scale.

And this is why I think Holse is chosen as the person who can actually grok it, even though it takes him a while. Holse can understand (and ultimately manipulate) hierarchy because he always saw himself as somewhat aloof from it. It doesn’t control him in the way it controls others because he is more aware of it as a system, as a set of interlocking rules and principles. He doesn’t see monarchy as some expression of divine right; monarchy simply is, and he deals pragmatically with things as they stand. This makes him a survivor, and ultimately an agent of change.

Because Holse, you see, is the Culture in microcosm.

James: All I’d add to that is that at Alt.Fiction Banks said that he used the title Matter because it was the working title for The Steep Approach To Garbadale, so he used it again to annoy everyone on the interwebtubes…

The Sam Gunn Omnibus by Ben Bova

Tor Books, 704 pp; $29.95 HBK (US RRP); ISBN 978-0765316172; pub. Feb 2007

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As the title suggests, the The Sam Gunn Omnibus is a fix-up novel that collects all of Ben Bova’s stories about the eponymous hero, written for and published in the US science fiction magazines of the late 1980s and early ’90s.

So, who is Sam Gunn? He’s the boom-bust entrepreneur incarnate, an embodiment of laissez faire capitalism in space exploration who names spaceships after free-market economists and sees a profit in every problem, large or small. He’s also a reincarnated Huck Finn in a space suit; a tireless braggart and womaniser; the natural enemy of rules, regulations and corporate methodology. If it wasn’t for his redeeming habit of helping out his friends en route to his next pile of riches, you’d have to hate him on principle – and most people already do.

And that’s as far as it goes for character development. Gunn is an avatar, a plot device through which Bova explores and exploits the solar system using scientifically plausible methods that governments and corporations have so far refused to use, for various reasons. As such, these tales of the first businesses, hotels and habitats in orbit should be hugely relevant in this era of nascent space tourism operations, inspiring grandiose dreams of a brighter bolder future for our species.

And they might still have been, if the stage wasn’t hogged by the overbearing and improbable Gunn. The other characters are no better - a roster of crude geopolitical stereotypes and caricatures - and it is probably the attitudes implicit in these characterisations that most clearly date these stories as relics of a bygone era. The life of Sam Gunn reads like an apologia for greed and misogyny, and even readers sympathetic with Bova’s yearnings for the human race to escape the gravity well may find themselves tiring of the same successful-underdog plot continually reiterated against a slightly different backdrop.

Perhaps I’ve just missed the point, even though Bova’s introduction suggests that there is no point to miss. As pure escapist wish-fulfilment, the Omnibus succeeds, but the reader in search of true sensawunda may wish to search elsewhere.

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[This review was originally published in Interzone some time early in 2007; the precise issue number currently escapes me. It is offered in lieu of more substantial and original content during this particularly busy week.]

I don’t like to think of myself as the boastful gloating type. But today, I shall wilfully be exactly that.

Because I have an ARC of the new Iain M. Banks ‘Culture’ novel, Matter.

Nothing else matters, indeed.

[I was pipped to the post with my boast by the good Mr Bloomer of Big Dumb Object ... but I retain top rank among jammy bastards, because I have the privilege of doing an interview with Banks for an Interzone feature. I believe the appropriate phrase is "get in"!]

Peer-to-peer book sharing

There’s an awful lot of people who’d very much like to be able to read that book rightf*ckingnow. That hunger for fresh material has driven the P2P distribution systems, at least as far as the music industry is concerned, but as yet there’s no easy way to ‘rip’ a book.

Or is there?

Well, obviously there is, or I wouldn’t have laid that obvious bait. Observe! The Atiz BookSnap:

Atiz are calling it the first consumer book-ripper, but that’s a bit of a stretch at over US$1500. But it is the Model-T of things to come; a device that will (with some assistance from you, at least in this instance) convert a book into a digitally scanned PDF file.

I have my own set of opinions about this, which regular readers will doubtless be able to predict quite effectively. But I’d be fascinated to hear the opinions of library staff, publishing staff, bibliophiles and writers about what this will mean to them (and everyone else) in the long term.

First one to mention DRM is a rotten apple.

As already noted at T3Aspace and reported by Gareth L. Powell, Jason Stoddard has decided to release an entire unpublished novel for free under a Creative Commons licence. Winning Mars is an expansion of the novella by the same name that appeared in Interzone #196.

Now, in the interests of full disclosure, I should point out that Jason and I are friends, that he helped me out by building my concrete compound of doom in Second Life for me (and made a fine job of it too), and that I may have started this habit by convincing him to release his short story “Fermi Packet” in a similar fashion.

But in case you’re thinking that means you should take my recommendation with a pinch of salt, bear in mind that as well as being published in Interzone (more than once), he’s also sold short stories to Futurismic, Talebones, Darker Matter and Strange Horizons, among others.

What I’m trying to say is that this guy writes great science fiction, and that Winning Mars will be well worth your time. At this price (you know, like, free), how could it not be? All he asks is that you let him know what you though of it after you’ve read it, positive or negative.

So, what are you waiting for? Download the PDF of Winning Mars now, while stocks last!

[Cross-posted to Futurismic]

Just logged in to SL and found a notecard in my inbox that I thought I should share with the science fiction community. Joe Haldeman is doing a book reading in Second Life this Sunday coming:

I’d like to invite you … to a meetup with science-ficiton writer Joe Haldeman [on] Sunday [August] 12th at 9 am SLT [that's 1pm GMT BST, UK people]. Joe will give a reading from his upcoming novel, “The Accidental Time Machine,” if the voice client is feeling like working Sunday.

If the voice client is not working, we’ll just do the meetup as a text chat.

Either way, Joe will be talking about his novel, science fiction, writing, science, art and more, and answering questions from me and from the audience.

I hope to see you, and your group, there.

– Ziggy Figaro

Landmark to the event location - the Amphitheater at Dr. Dobb’s Island:

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Dr%20Dobbs%20Island/204/118/25

I think I’m going to be at a family gathering on Sunday, but if not I shall certainly be logging in. If anyone wants to tag along but is new to SL, drop me an email and we’ll arrange to meet up, or I’ll put you on to someone else who can chaperone you.

“Dark Space” by Marianne de Pierres (Book 1 of The Sentients of Orion)

Orbit Books, May 2007; 432pp, UK PBK; ISBN-13: 978-1841494289

Reviewed by Paul Raven

WARNING: This critique can be considered to contain ’spoilers’.

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The strapline reads “Dark space is not really dark. Neither is it empty.” Twisting this to refer to the book itself, it’s half right: Dark Space is certainly not empty. It is, however, very dark. Unflinchingly so; it’s a complex and exciting novel, almost devoid of cheap sentiment and comfortable vindication. It’s not a cheerful read, but it is a very rewarding one.One of the established modes of science fiction is the story that asks “what if this carries on?” With Dark Space, de Pierres is performing a variation of that mode, which we might choose to describe as “what if this happened again?” Having created a world that draws heavily on the politics (and to some extent the language and other trappings) of the Italian city-states of the Renaissance, de Pierres is able to examine societies and interpersonal relationships from feminist and Marxist angles without seemingly having any particular axe to grind other than that of general progressiveness – though a more coherent agenda promises to reveal itself over the course of the series.

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If you want to read my entire critique of de Pierres’ “Dark Space”, you’ll need to pop over to T3A Space, of course. I know, I’m such a tease …

Dalian Hansen isn’t real in the way that you or I are real, but he’s at least as real as the person who created him as his Second Life persona chooses him to be. Dalian is about to become the first Second Life avatar to publish a book in which the majority of the plot takes place in Linden Labs’ notorious virtual world.

He’s not the first novelist in SL, nor is the book the first to deal with the concept of the metaverse, nor is it the first book to appear in full in SL - but the combination of the three is a first, as far as I can tell.

As the book inherently has a science fictional theme at its heart, not to mention being written by someone who is a virtual extension of a real person in a way that would have been unimaginable outside of science fiction less than a decade ago, I figured I’d like to chase him down and ask him some questions about the project.

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PR: So, tell me a little about yourself - what do you do in SL, and in RL* (if you don’t mind talking about both)?

DH: “Dalian Hansen is an Avatar that exits in Second Life. Among his many virtual projects as a computer generated simulation, Dalian is the Creative Director for Tretiak Media LLC (a SL Development firm which owns the SLQuery.com data engine service), Architect for such in-world clients as IBM and ABN-AMRO, and former Creative Director of the popular monthly Second Life magazine, SLBusiness.

His Anima connects to the virtual world from Manchuria, China. This meat version of Dalian’s digital persona is recognized as an internationally award winning Creative Director and photographer. He is also one of the first foreigners to host a Chinese network news program in China.”

PR: Have you always been a fan of science fiction novels?

DH: “I was always a fan of science fiction stories, but as a kid I didn’t read many books. So TV, movies, and comics were my primary exposure to the genre. As my tastes matured, I found novels and my imagination to be more entertaining.”

PR: Any favourite authors or books?

DH: “I like the classic Science Fiction books from Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Frank Herbert and Philip K. Dick. These guys understood the science of the fiction, and its social effect. They built a world around the technology and made it believable. I would say that Dean R. Koontz remains a big influence on me. I have read over 40 of his books that go back to the beginning of his career, when he wrote pure science fiction.”

PR: Have you always wanted to be writer?

DH: “My written work has been published for years in some form, I just never made a living from it. As a kid, I had all these visual ideas but lacked the talent to express them with my hands by freehand drawing. So I turned to writing as a way to paint pictures with words. It also meant I was not dependant on anyone to create my vision.

As I got older, the computer was a big liberation for me. It was a tool that allowed me to finally express these ideas in pictures. As a result, I eventually became a Creative Director for major advertising agencies and made TV commercials and such for international clients. I still enjoy writing, but being a visual artist puts food on the table. Plus, writing takes a great deal of time and emotional commitment. It is like a relationship because it consumes the mind and requires a constant focus, at least for me.”

PR: Tell me why you’ve chosen to write directly about Second Life - a personal fascination, or marketing decision?

DH: “I wanted tell a story where Second Life was more than just an environment, it would be like a character. There have been many guide books about Second Life and short stories about virtual avatar adventures. But this is my attempt to bring the idea into mainstream fiction.

I took well documented points in Second Life history and combined them with real people and fictional characters to invent a mythical story and secret world. After all, reading a book is still the ultimate virtual reality for the human imagination, and establishing this lets Second Life exist in your mind and not just the computer. So I wanted to offer a fun story connected to Second Life in the spirit of old dimestore pulp fiction novels.

“Anima” is just the beginning of a bigger saga I would like to tell. I really don’t care about fame or profit from this or future books. It was just something I wanted to do. I set my mind to it and the accomplishment is its own reward. I don’t expect or care if the novel is a success. And even if it is an utter failure, I’d rather accept that than the regret of not trying.

After all, not very much in science fiction is completely unique or original. But many stories can evolve a popular theme into something fresh and entertaining. That is all I have tried to do and never intended to deliver a groundbreaking epic.”

PR: Do you see there being a long-term future for the written word as entertainment? And if so, do virtual worlds have a part to play in it?

DH: “Human history has been documented by the stories we tell. Whether by campfire in a cave or on a computer terminal connected by the world wide web. People have told stories long before the written word was invented, which basically turned spoken sounds into pictures. The written word is just a medium. It is our nature to tell stories, and the environment only changes how this is done or what we use to do it.

Printed books created an explosion of information in their day. The Internet has created another such revolution. Technology will always provide different opportunities, but I think the purpose remains the same. Whether a story is written, painted, acted, or virtually simulated, the method is meant to communicate. The written word has been a useful tool, and it stands to reason that it will continue to have a relationship and place even in the virtual age.”

PR: According to the synopsis I read, your novel deals with SL as being a very serious and very real part of the protagonist’s life - can you tell me how you see the penetration of synthetic worlds into meatspace going in the next decade?

DH: “No one could have guessed the effect of the Internet on world cultures. It is easy to draw parallels about the direction of the metaverse, but there are many side effects that cannot be predicted. For example, velcro was invented for the space missions. The internet was invented to protect American military computers from a nuclear attack. I think the bigger effect of the future metaverse is in these side effects. Sure, it will be a simulated world where we can interact. But with the freedom it offers, economic opportunities, and technology it inspires, these other effects will be more far reaching. The influences and habits of the Internet are now far more powerful than the tool itself.”

[* Note for meatspacers - RL is Second Life slang for 'real life'.]

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I think the real take-away for me here is that someone so obviously deeply involved with the metaverse believes there’s a valid future for the written word as entertainment - an interesting contrast to the ironically technophobic Old Guard of the genre.

Of course, the proof is in the pudding with any book is in the reading. But Hansen seems to be able to talk the author talk pretty well, even if he doesn’t seem to bothered about the project being a commercial success, so I’ll be trying to fit it into my reading schedule at some point soon - I’m curious to see what he’s come up with.

A final morsel to chew over - if it’s possible for a virtual avatar to publish and promote a book, how will this affect the gender and cultural biases that currently plague genre fiction? Will initialising and anglicising names go out, in favour of writing under an entire assumed persona - one that isn’t necessarily even human in form, let alone gendered or coloured?

If you’ve been waiting for me to make a post about Second Life that genuinely intersects with the world of science fiction, your moment has just arrived.

3pointD reports that a gentleman who goes by the name Dalian Hansen in SL is due to release a novel set almost entirely in Second Life, Linden Labs’ virtual world. As they provide no link to the source (it was a personal tip-off, apparently), I shall snip Dalian’s description/synopsis from the 3pointD announcement:

“Ben Tao is the avatar of a fired programmer who hacks Second Life. His goal is to profit from a false intellectual property claim. However, instead of changing the creation date for the items he has stolen, he is actually sending them back in time to the creation of the 3D world. This software exploit opens a wormhole of conflicting realities that unfold in a disjointed nightmare. Ben quickly finds himself controlled by an entity who robs him of all free will. Or is he just going insane? As the digital and real worlds merge in his mental interchange, he uncovers a secret that affects all of humanity. From this bleak future, Ben has only one chance to escape.”

Well, nothing groundbreaking there, at least from an sf-nal storytelling angle. After all, cyberspace was named in ink-and-paper fiction way back in 1984 thanks to Bill Gibson, the concept was arguably being kicked around before that, and there’s been plenty of recent (and forthcoming) novels dealing with virtual worlds and MMOs.

What’s important is that this book is set in a real, extant metaverse platform - if that synopsis is to be believed, it explicitly names Second Life as the arena of action. Whether or not that will encourage people who might not have bothered with ’some sci-fi rubbish’ to read it remains to be seen … as does Linden Labs’ reaction to having what I assume is a trademark being used in such a way.

What also remains to be seen is whether it’s any good, in novelistic terms. A swift google of the name Dalian Hansen reveals that the man behind the avatar is “[a]n internationally award winning photographer based in Asia”, and an experienced virtual business boffin to boot … but that tells us nothing of whether or not he can write for toffee.

The 3pointD report quotes Hansen as saying that:

“… preview editions will be published as a prim book in SL and as a paperback available from CafePress.com, both due July 7, with a hardcover edition available on Amazon.com as of July 27 …”

It also makes the point that neither Amazon or Cafepress have a listing for the item in question as of yet (and hence is hesitant to report the news as a definite). So I think we can assume it’s a self-publishing job … but again, that doesn’t necessarily mean it won’t be any good. I get the feeling that Hansen is the type who wants to lead with virtual business methods, so maybe it’s as much a proof-of-concept as anything else.

But there’s only one way to find out for certain, and that’s to go straight to the horse’s mouth. So I shall be attempting to get in touch with Av. Hansen in SL later tonight, to see if he’d like to talk about this further.

I’m very pleased to announce that Gareth L. Powell has sold his first novel, Silversands, to Pendragon Press. It’s been quite a month for Gareth, as just a few weeks ago he announced the acceptance of his first short story collection. Congratulations, Gareth, and well deserved.

I just heard it from Andrew McKie, who posted it about fifteen minutes before the moment in which I am typing. I can’t say that’s a result that disappoints me in any way whatsoever. Congratulations, Mr. Harrison. Well deserved.