PDF Changing Planes: Armchair Travel for the Mind (GOLLANCZ S.F.)

Free download. Book file PDF easily for everyone and every device. You can download and read online Changing Planes: Armchair Travel for the Mind (GOLLANCZ S.F.) file PDF Book only if you are registered here. And also you can download or read online all Book PDF file that related with Changing Planes: Armchair Travel for the Mind (GOLLANCZ S.F.) book. Happy reading Changing Planes: Armchair Travel for the Mind (GOLLANCZ S.F.) Bookeveryone. Download file Free Book PDF Changing Planes: Armchair Travel for the Mind (GOLLANCZ S.F.) at Complete PDF Library. This Book have some digital formats such us :paperbook, ebook, kindle, epub, fb2 and another formats. Here is The CompletePDF Book Library. It's free to register here to get Book file PDF Changing Planes: Armchair Travel for the Mind (GOLLANCZ S.F.) Pocket Guide.
Changing Planes: Armchair Travel for the Mind (GOLLANCZ S.F.) eBook: Ursula K. Le Guin: leondumoulin.nl: Kindle Store.
Table of contents

Both books are due on their respective editor's desks in September. They're very different: this next one, "Halting State", is going to be a near-future thriller set in Edinburgh about ten years from now, in the hazy zone where contemporary crime novels cross over with science fiction. In fact, it's going to be so close to the moment that I'm in danger of perpetrating a work of mundane SF. Being inclined towards crazy stunt performances, I'm planning on writing "Halting State" on my mobile phone.

This is technologically feasible because the phone in question has more memory and online storage than every mainframe in North America in and about the same amount of raw processing power as a vintage Cray-1 supercomputer. It's a zeitgeist thing: I need to get into the right frame of mind, and I need to use a mobile phone for the same reason Neal Stephenson used a fountain pen when he wrote the Baroque cycle.

Afters all, I want to stick my head ten years into the future. It's getting weird out there in embedded intelligence land; the net is alive to the sound of pinging toasters, RFID chips are the latest virus target, and people are making business deals inside computer games.

The architect who built an entire island

The internet's old hat too, even with a second dot com boom and bust looking: in ten years' time we'll be up to Web 3. Gibsonian cyberspace fits the picture about the way the US interstate highway system fits in a s road movie. It's time to move on. As part of the research for "Halting State" I've been wallowing around in a whole bunch of blogs. You can get the official line on a community or culture by reading its publications, things like "RFID World" magazine or The Job the London Metropolitan Police's newspaper , but the view at worm's eye level is very different and I suspect more likely to give you an idea of where things are really going.

Strange communities are popping up everywhere on the web as it integrates ever more closely with our ordinary society. On the one hand, there are the academic and technical specialists: I'm inclined to wonder what Jaron Lanier or Michael Benedikt would have made of Terra Nova if you'd waved a dot matrix printout of it at them back in ? And then there's the furtively anonymous subculture of the blogging cops — Cough the Lot , A year in the life of a Police dispatcher , The Policeman's Blog , and so on.

Why focus on these two? Well, among other things I'm interested in seeing what happens when you mash the two cultures together, the VR eggheads seeing the s skiffy idea of cyberspace turn into a s commercial phenomenon and a s social scene, and the police who're going to end up with a whole lot of new headaches as the physical world acquires a virtual mapping. Hugo nomination deadline approaching Just a reminder that if you attended last year's world science fiction convention, or are registered as a member of this year's con, you can nominate works for the Hugo awards. You can vote online here , or by post.

Hint: my eligible novels are Accelerando which you can download for free from that link and "The Hidden Family". My eligible short fiction is "Snowball's Chance" published in Nova Scotia: the new anthology of Scottish speculative fiction , and, um, that's about it. Ebook news Sorry 'bout the lack of updates: I've been knee-deep in work, then took off for five days of meetings and stuff, only to succumb to a nasty cold when I got home — the kind that leaves you feeling like a dishrag for a week afterwards.

Normal service will be resumed, etcetera One of the questions I periodically get asked is "can I get an electronic version of [insert book title here]? With the exception of the free version of Accelerando , and a crippleware version of "Singularity Sky" from Ace, by way of Fictionwise — DRM-locked to a single reader.

However, the situation is now changing. Baen more or less have a corner on the military-SF market, and are a relatively small player in the US market, with maybe 50 titles a year to Tor's and Ace's However, they're small enough to be agile and innovative, and since or thereabouts they've been running an effective subsidiary, Webscription. You sign up with Webscriptions to get an account, then order books from their web site.

You pay by credit card, and then you can download the books you've paid for as many times as you need to. Rule 1: the customer is not a PDA, they may change computers. Rule 2: trust your customers, don't treat them like shoplifters. There are other aspects of the Webscription service model that are attractive.

You can buy books individually, typically for less than the price of a paperback guess what? From the writers point of view, the royalty rate ain't bad — they pay twice the percentage of a hardcover, reflecting the lower cost of production and distribution. So they're cheaper for readers but pay the authors enough to live on. Rule 3: don't rip your customers off. Rule 4: don't rip your suppliers off, either. I'm pleased to say that Webscriptions have been doing good business, and, despite the marked lack of success of the rest of the ebook biz, they're expanding.

I'm even more pleased to note that my largest publisher, Tor, have noticed that Webscriptions are making money where other folks aren't, and have decided to join in. From March onwards, a number of Tor titles will be sold through Webscriptions, including my own Merchant Princes books starting with "The Family Trade" and "The Hidden Family" immediately, and to be followed by "The Clan Corporate" in parallel with its dead-tree publication.

Frogs and trilogies Quiet, isn't it? Yes, I know, I haven't been updating my blog recently. It's not my fault: if you folks didn't buy them I wouldn't have to write them Anyway, in addition to being busy with work, I've got to make a trip to the US next week.

What other items do customers buy after viewing this item?

It's a business trip, honest. Go on: point to where I said I would shun the shores of that continent forever. Yes, astute convention-going SF fans may spot me at Boskone — where do you think I'm doing business? I've also got a trip to Dublin next month. And a trip to London the month after that, with a week in tropical Glasgow sandwiched in-between for the Eastercon. I'd be right on top of the day job if I wasn't taking all this time off for travel, honest. In fact, the incessant travel has led me to buy a five-year old computer, just because it's a sub-notebook so tiny that I can type on it on the tray table in economy class.

It's CPU is half the speed of my new mobile phone's, although it has slightly more RAM and a much friendlier keyboard. Technology marches on One of the things I've been grappling with lately is the long haul — coming to terms with the difference between writing a couple of linked novels, and writing a series, a huge, articulated structure in which individual books are mere chapters. This is because I'm currently wrestling with plot octopi and setting serpents down in the mire of the fourth Merchant Princes book.

Back in the dim and distant days of late , I originally figured I'd write four of them: four fat, self-contained novels expanding upon a common setting and background idea. No plan survives contact with the enemy, though, and big, fat, fantasy yarns are not entirely fashionable this decade. The first book, "A Family Trade", suffered the fate of many a stage magician's assistant: its truncated torso was followed into print by "The Hidden Family", and the second book, "The Clan Corporate", became the third in the series.

Moreover, I'd originally intended "The Clan Corporate" to be a page doorstop. The book of that name that's coming out this June is a svelte, shapely page novel — unlike its predecessors, I got the signal about how long it was to be before I got my teeth into it.

Changing Travel Industry

However, it's not the second planned big fat book from — it's the first third of it, the first installment of a trilogy within an ongoing series. And you know what? I've never written a trilogy before. A common complaint about the trilogy as a literary format is that the middle volume tends towards flab. Book one establishes characters and setting, and puts them in jeopardy or starts a plot-related ball rolling: book three resolves conflicts and brings thematic closure, but the middle volume just seems to keep rolling that ball along.

Editions of Changing Planes by Ursula K. Le Guin

From inside the belly of the beast, however, it's a very different picture. One of the necessities of any dramatic plot is an increase in tension between the initial situation and the climax. The middle volume seems to drag only because it is, in the terms of the memorable boiling frog , turning up the heat under the critters. By the end of the middle volume the heat ought to be just barely survivable, leaving the readers in no doubt that in the next book the frogs are going to start hopping.

But for the frog-boiling bits themselves to be memorable Incidentally, the folk tale — that if you put a frog in a cool kettle and apply the heat gently, it won't notice the water temperature rising — is apparently untrue. But it's a neat metaphor for gradual intensification of stress, so I'm going to keep using it as such. Back to the topic in hand. I'm currently boiling a frog, or several frogs, in a middle-volume kettle.

And to keep it from getting too monotonous I've spread out the omniscient viewpoint which spent most of "The Clan Corporate" watching a single individual until it's time-sharing between half a dozen pivotal players as they gradually discover that their world — or rather, worlds — are not as they thought they were. And that's another headache, because broadening the scope of a story from the personal to the political brings its own problems of pacing and insight. The first three books were personal, the portrayal of one woman running head-first into cultural and economic structures that proved increasingly difficult to deal with.

Now I'm trying to demonstrate how her impact has reverberated through those structures, and there's no way to do that from a single constrained viewpoint. So in some ways the story is mutating as of book four into an entirely different type of beast. A brief confession: I've always been uneasy with the Fantasy label that was pinned on "Merchant Princes" from the outset.

It seemed to me that what I was trying to do is very much more at home in the science fictional tradition, because I'd set out to explore the way in which certain technologies might dictate the structure of a society that employs them — or even to handicap its development. Which is essentially a job that requires a disruptive story arc, one that does not return to the eternal status quo ante — one of the characteristics of SF. Having shed one label I'm in no hurry to grab another for it, and you're welcome to keep calling it fantasy for as long as you think the hat fits — but you can take this as advance notice that the series may well take some wild swerves in the near future.

And therein lies my hope for avoiding middle-volume-of-trilogy boredom: just when you, gentle reader, are settling down to knit yourself to sleep beside the simmering kettle, I'm going to let off some firecrackers and fill the bathtub with brightly-coloured machine parts. Got typos? But one pair of eyes is never as good as ten thousand. Spotted something? Let me know about it here. More shameless self-publicity It has been drawn to my attention that "Accelerando" has been shortlisted for the Arthur C.

Clarke award for science fiction. The winner will be announced on April 26th in London. Shameless self-publicity Accelerando the novel, not the separate stories it grew from has been shortlisted for the BSFA Award for best novel of Stupid authorial mistakes, How hard is it to break open a padlock by shooting it? On the one hand, I'm glad someone's actually done the research and demonstrated that your hoary old fiction trope is, ahem, rubbish.

On the other hand, as it's a trope I've used myself Then I got my teeth into some other administrivia that had been building up while I went over deadline my own personal one, not the one in the book contract on TJM. I'm off next Friday to an SF convention in Ireland, so I thought I'd get everything nailed down and ship-shape before departure -- TJM is the last novel I've actually got a signed contract for at present, so I could go away knowing I had actually finished everything.

Which is probably why I promptly came down with the cold from hell; nose auditioning for an SFX role in a low-budget Lovecraft movie green ichor generator , occasional racking cough caused by breathing through my mouth and getting dried out -- see nose, above , the usual.