FOGcon 8 Schedule

Once again, I’ll be attending FOGcon this year. I’m looking forward to seeing a lot of familiar friendly faces, and hopefully meeting new authors and readers. Here’s my schedule:

• Saturday, 3:00 PM, Sacramento Room: "How Much Do We Trust the Machine?"
• Saturday, 4:30 PM, Santa Rosa Room: Reading 

I’m particularly excited to be moderating the “How Much Do We Trust the Machine?” panel since the panelists include honored guest Ada Palmer. I’m just about finished with her novel Too Like the Lightning, and am really enjoying it.

As for my reading slot, I’m still undecided as to what exactly I’ll be reading. I haven’t been making as much forward progress on The Beasts of Qaza as I’d like, and I’m not sure any of the new chapters are ready for public consumption. It’ll probably end up being a game time decision. I’ll be sure to post an update after the convention. To keep track of real-time news and notes during the convention, make sure to connect with me on Twitter.

All the best,

Garrett Calcaterra

The List of Cli-Fi from SF/F Authors

(Click here to get right to the list!)

At FOGcon 2017, I'm moderating a panel on climate change and the geography of daily life. To facilitate our conversation, I put together this list of notable climate fiction (cli-fi) written specifically by science fiction and fantasy authors. I should point out that there is a much larger body of cli-fi work from writers in mainstream fiction, but I'm not including them here. Additionally, I'm inclined to include SF novels based on other planets, as well as secondary world fantasy, if climate change is one of the over-arching conflicts or themes.

Just a couple of other quick notes on the list. This will be a working document that I'll update periodically. As such, please share any books you think should be added in the comment section.

Unless the annotations are in quotes, they come from me. Having said that, I haven't read all these books (yet), so some of the annotations are simply me paraphrasing plot summaries from the publisher or author's website. (To that end, if you're making a book recommendation in the comments, feel free to write your own original annotation, and include a link to your homepage or social media handle and I'll quote you in the main article itself if/when I add the book.)

FOGcon 2017

Once again I'll be attending FOGcon this year, and I'm excited to be participating in three scheduled events. FOGcon takes place in Walnut Creek from March 10 – 12, and is an all around awesome convention that takes great care to be inclusive and diverse with its programming topics. Tickets are available at the door. You can learn more info here.

Here's my personal schedule, but I will also be hanging around most of the weekend attending other panels (or at the bar), so if you're attending and see me loitering around, please say hi!

Spring Doings

Dreary, rainy weather inspires me to read and write, but I somehow always manage to be more productive in the Spring than in the winter. Seems a little cliche, what with all the spring "rebirth" symbolism and what have you, but there you have it. I'm a busy bee when it comes to writing in the spring.

Here's a quick recap of what's going on.

Garrett Calcaterra at FOGcon 6

I'm very excited to be participating in this year's FOGcon, FOGcon 6 to be precise. The guests of honor are Jo Walton, Ted Chiang, and Donna Haraway. The posthumous "ghost of honor" is Octavia Butler. Butler is a big influence of mine, and incidentally enough, I just discussed her novel Wild Seed in a guest blog post I wrote called "The Fantasy and Sci-Fi Novels that Inspired The Dreamwielder Chronicles." I'm pretty excited to catch some panels on her work. I'm also excited to hopefully meet Katherine Kerr, who will be appearing on several panels. I remember enjoying her Deverry series when I was in my early teens.

FOGcon, Cli-Fi, and Wattpad

FOGcon has come and gone, and along with it my first appearance on a panel at a SF/F convention. Yay, I’m no longer a virgin! The convention itself was fantastic. It was great to catch up with Tim Powers, one of the guests of honor, and I learned a lot from attending the panels I wasn’t involved in. One panel in particular, “Manic Pixie Angel,” really opened my eyes to the inadvertent sexism and prejudice common in fiction. Seanan McGuire, the other guest of honor, was hilarious and insightful in the discussion. Afterward, I gave a lot of thought to my female characters in Dreamwielder, and was relieved to come away knowing they all stood up as strong characters, independent of the male characters in the story.

Why I Suck at Blogging So Far in 2014

Keeping a consistent posting schedule is the trademark of a good blogger, so if there was any doubt before, it’s decided—I’m definitely not a good blogger. But that’s okay. I’m a spec-fiction author first and foremost, and if I’m not spending time here at The Machine Stops, it’s because I’m busy with other aspects of my writing career, and that has been the case so far in the year 2014.

Let’s start with the biggie. Dreamwielder is now available in print! Available in trade paperback format to be precise. I’m pretty stoked, and would like to thank the great people at Diversion Books and my agent Liz Kracht for making it happen, and I’d especially like to thank everyone who purchased, reviewed, and helped spread the word about the e-book and audiobook versions of the novel over the past year—without your support, the print version never would have come to be. To help spread the word, I'm raffling off a great prize package of four signed books, a Wheel House CD, and an empty Cthulhu mint tin I stole from Tim Powers! Simply head over to my FB page and share my book link to be entered into the random drawing.