Books I Liked And Why I Liked Them: Fifth Season, All The Birds In The Sky, Library At Mount Char

So here’s some books I’d recommend, along with the thing that’s stuck with me months after reading them:
N.K. Jemesin’s The Fifth Season – Clearly Explaining The Unknown
Here’s a thing I didn’t realize was hard about writing until I saw N.K. Jemesin doing it effortlessly:
Explaining what’s happening without explaining why.
If I tell you “A guy is shooting at us from far away,” well, you understand both what and why.  You understand that a gun is designed to kill people with super-fast projectiles, you understand that it’s fired only when someone’s trying to kill you, you understand that this is deadly force.
That’s the “Why.”
Now surgically remove all of those elements to leave you in the dark about what a gun is, leaving you only the “what.”  You hear loud noises.  People are dying, maybe with little puffs of blood coming out of them, but you don’t know what bullets are and those fuckers are moving too fast for you to see.  You aren’t even aware that bullets come from a set direction unless you’re really good at intuiting on the fly, or maybe you see a flash from that window and connect the dots –
But the sequence of events is much more likely to confuse you.  You get that people are dying.  But explaining exactly what is going on without providing greater context is hard – and it gets harder later on when you have a character who can explain how this “gun” works and your mind snaps into context and goes, “Oh, okay, a gun, now all that made sense.”
You don’t see a lot of magic described in fiction without the why, because without a why lots of mundane things become impossible to describe, let alone crazy magic systems.  A guy’s mowing my lawn as we speak, and I envision writing a scene where a dude with a low-set deathblade machine methodically uses it to truncate certain forms of vegetation, and Jesus that’s going to leave a lot of people confused unless I explain why he’s doing that.
Jemesin is a goddamned expert on writing magic where you understand exactly what is going on, but don’t have the faintest clue why things are working that way.  You’re never more confused than you need to be.  You understand the results but not the reasons, which makes it so incredibly satisfying when the reasons come along later on and they all make sense and you get a sense of this stupendously deep magic system that keeps going, and going, and going.
It won the Hugo.  It deserved to.
Charlie Jane Anders’ All The Birds In The Sky – Endless Possibilities
All the Birds in the Sky can be described as “quirky.”  If you’re looking for a book with a finely-tuned plot, don’t bother – this is a book that meanders, taking long strolls down interesting paths, sometimes hand-waving the parts that aren’t as much fun to delve back into the weird stuff.
I absolutely love that tone.  I love the way this book doesn’t care about anything except what it thinks is cool.
Basically, All the Birds in the Sky follows two kids – one of whom grows up to become a great nature-witch working for a worldwide conspiracy, the other who becomes a techno-savant in a Silicon Valley world-changing tech corp – and both halves of that equation are unpredictable and unlike what you’ve seen in books before.
But it’s the side-trips I like.  Charlie Jane allows us to get snagged on these weird side characters with their own crazy histories, these little asides that flesh out the world.  A lesser book would have zoomed in on these two (compelling!) competing people, but by pulling out and allowing the rest of the world to take center stage from time to time what you get is this feeling of a world with limitless potential.
A lot of books feel like a Disney Park theme ride – everything happens within full view of you, and when you get off the ride you’ve seen all there is to offer.  Whereas All The Birds In The Sky makes me want to hop off that Disney ride because we just passed another ride, and that one looks so interesting too, but oh we only get a glimpse of it before riding into the distance.
I had the exact same feeling that I did when I read Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell in that I would have been perfectly happy if this book had chosen never to end, and just kept following these awesome people around so I could hang with them.  The ending’s disappointing, but largely that’s because I didn’t particularly want it to finish, so I can hardly blame Charlie Jane for that.
Scott Hawkins’ Library At Mount Char – Tender, Loving Brutality
Picture a school like Hogwarts, instead of being run by a loving Dumbledore, it’s run by God.
Like, the guy who is in charge of the universe.  He didn’t create the universe.  You think.  But he is in absolute control of it, and he’s trying to teach you how to be his acolytes with the casually world-bending power that wizards have, and the only way he can do that is by showing you all the terrors of the universe.
You are at his whim.  There is nothing you can do.  He is God.  And yet he is gifting you with such extraordinary powers, even though he killed your mother and father and took you on-board and you strongly suspect he reorganized time in order to ensure you wound up right where he needed you so you were at your most vulnerable.
It’s a hell of a school.  You learn a lot.
But oh, how it costs.
And the thing is, I loved Library at Mount Char because this sounds brutal, and the book is even more brutal than that, with these psychologically scarred kids being put through a wringer and the world being battered at the hands of a guy who actually is more powerful than you’d dream.  (Like, death won’t save you from him – he’ll just go get you back, and he’s teaching you how to do that too.)
But peel away that very thick rind of horror, and underneath is one of the most compassionate books I have ever read.  I’ve never before read a book where buckets of blood is literally tame compared to what the headmaster does, and yet the characters come to such beautiful realizations that reader, I wept.
It’s a gorgeous balance – this book’s tender moments wouldn’t function without the alien coldness of the universe Scott Hawkins created, because the strange kindnesses that form when you’re smashed down that thoroughly become so meaningful.
And that ending.  Oh, I won’t spoil it for you.
But that ending.
 

FIX Is Out In A Week, And So Am I! See Me In Boston! (And Cleveland.)

So my book Fix is out precisely seven days from now.  If you love the ‘Mancer family, this will be the most harrowing adventure yet.  Because when my publisher Angry Robot asked me if I could write a trilogy, I knew there’d be three stories you can tell about a family:

• Flex is about a family coming together – Paul meeting Valentine meeting Aliyah.
• The Flux was about someone malicious trying to split that family up for their own ends.
• Fix is about what happens when someone altruistic tries to split the family up for the good of the world.

Y’all wanted to see what’s happening in Europe – and when you see how horribly the world is fragmenting in Bastogne, you’ll understand why the Unimancers are hellbent on brainwashing every ‘mancer they can get their hands on.  A recent review said that “{Fix} has the feeling of a series that is growing up, in much the same way that Lord of the Rings started with birthday parties and fireworks but then led to war, this series started out with fun and references but then took us down the road of consequences.”
And I promise you, there is fun and family and donuts – but there’s also what happens when good people get pushed to their far ends.  For every one of you who wrote to me to say, “Paul is too passive in The Flux!  He needs to get out there and protect his daughter!”, I will say to you:
Be careful what you wish for.
Anyway, it’s for sale in a week.  As always, preorders help authors, so if you wanna order it now, yeah, that’d be great.
And I will be in Boston this weekend, which I will remind you of once more on Friday and then fall silent, because I suspect a lot of people in Boston don’t know I’m coming this Sunday because a) it was a late addition and b) it’s Labor Day Weekend.  But I will be driving many miles to see you all!  I’ll bring donuts!
And of course, there’s always the Cleveland release party.  And the whole West Coast tour.  But regardless, books are out, I’m exhausted after spending thirty hours (yes, thirty goddamned hours) last week polishing up my new book so it can go out on submission before the 2016 holiday rush starts, and I hope y’all like what I did.
Now I’m gonna collapse and send love to all of you.  It’s what I do.

A Mentally Ill Man Ponders Whether Donald Trump Is Crazy

So there’s been a lot of talk lately about whether Donald Trump is actually crazy – the specific form of mental disorder varies depending on who’s talking, whether it’s narcissism or senility or sociopathy or what-have-you.  But basically, it all comes down to the fact that Donald keeps saying dumb things that torpedo his campaign, and is speaking in increasingly loopy and erratic sentences.
Maybe he’s not fit to be President.
And I have such, such mixed feelings on this.
To start,  I hate armchair diagnoses.  Trying to determine what Trump’s mental health is through the lens of the media is never going to be accurate – and, in fact, seems to be an accumulation of biases.   (Just as the right-wing Hillary armchair diagnoses of bad health is largely an eruption of Hillary hate.)  I despise Trump, and I find him to say monstrously stupid things, but trying to determine his actual state of mind from this obscured distance in the furor of a media campaign is a mug’s game.
Then there’s that ugly conflation going on – many people see Trump as dangerous, and their go-to is “Dangerous people are all mentally ill!”  Which is something you see all the time with shooters – if some mass murderer has been to a psychologist, you betcher ass it’s going to show up as an explanation sometime, because to a frightening number of people, “Dangerous” means “mentally ill.”
Which is partially a lack of distinction.  There are types of mental illness that make people a hazard to other people.  But part of the issue is that we throw any deviation from the norm into one big bucket that says “crazy,” and then label that bucket as “dangerous people.”  I know lots of people who suffer from depression and bipolar diseases who don’t harm anyone but themselves.  In fact, it’s probably more likely that these mentally ill people will be harmed than they’ll harm, as people with severe issues often fall into abusive relationships with people who use their insecurities against them.
So what I feel is going on here is that people can’t possibly imagine Trump doing and saying all these horrible things unless he’s mentally defective on some level.  Which, you know, maybe?  The issue is what you consider to be “mentally ill.”  A frightening number of serial killers are lucid, in-touch and control enough to know how to give answers that manipulate both press and psychologists; the only thing that really separates them from normal people is that they, you know, kill innocent humans.  Maybe that’s insanity.
But that route’s kinda slippery, because I’m not sure “evil” is the same as “insane.”  It feels uncomfortably to me like we’re going the old homosexuality route, where we look at someone who has different preferences than we do and labelling them insane.  Homosexuals and trans folk were – and are, in many circles – considered to be mentally ill just because they don’t want what most people want.  You could say that someone who doesn’t want a single-payer health plan has no empathy and therefore has a mental illness.  Eventually, that definition swells to “anyone whose brain doesn’t come to the conclusions that I have arrived at is insane.”
Which I’m not a fan of.  I’m the guy who’d look at some people and say, “Yeah, they’ve got it all together, except they’ve decided eating human beings is a legit call.”  We can lock away criminals without smearing them all with a loose diagnosis of mental illness – some people have different moralities but aren’t handicapped by mental drawbacks, which means, yes, we need to jail some sane people for doing shitty things.
But not every burglar is insane.  Some people are just dicks.
Yet in this whole “Let’s not tar the mentally ill with Trump” issue, one of the things that I dislike is the way people imply that we can’t ask whether Trump’s potential mental illnesses would interfere with his job.  And some arguments I’ve seen seem based in the idea that mentally ill people are good, functioning people and you shouldn’t ask questions like “Can a mentally ill person be President?” because it hurts the mentally ill.
Which I also dislike, because it seems to erase the idea that a mental illness is actually a drawback.
Look.  I would be a shitty President, because of my mental illness.  I break down under the wrong kinds of stress.  I sometimes retreat for days, not wanting to talk to anyone.  I need drugs to handle my anxiety for events that are out of my control – which, you know, is pretty much what being a President is.
I don’t believe in stigmatizing mental illnesses, but I also dislike the counterpush to imply that all people with mental illnesses function well.   No.  It’s a drawback, and if you can not have a mental illness, I’d highly recommend it.  If I had a way to get rid of this depression, I would.
Which is not to say that every person who has mental illness is unfit to be President.  Abraham Lincoln infamously suffered from severe depression – and that’s an armchair diagnosis I feel can be made fairly in retrospect, as his moods were well-documented – and he was a great President.  He kept it together despite his depression to be what I’d argue is America’s best President ever, a true hero for those of us whose brains betray us.
Yet on the other hand, we have Ronald Reagan.  And people didn’t want to discuss Ronnie’s senility during the election, because you can’t accuse an old man of being senile, that’s rude – yet going back through the history books, you’ll see that Reagan became increasingly forgetful, masking his incompetence with humor, drifting away from the Presidency to leave America as a pitched battle between his three advisors.
Maybe he didn’t have senile dementia back then, but his bad memory was an issue that affected all of us.
So I think it’s relevant to ask whether a Presidential candidate is mentally fit to do the job.  That’s appropriate.  A President has to be smart and alert, and if they can’t perform to the duties of the office, they shouldn’t be elected.
But I wish we could do it without framing it so poorly.  Donald Trump doesn’t have to be mentally ill to be unfit for office – there’s also plenty of people who are sane by all diagnoses whose temperament or work ethic make them a poor choice.
You don’t have to diagnose Donald to find him unfit.  The reasons why he constantly contradicts himself are opaque to us in the churn of the moment- but what matters is that he does contradict himself, and if that worries you, then don’t vote for him.  We don’t have to assign his increasingly meandering and incoherent sentences to a specific attribute – we can simply say, “I don’t want someone who does things like that in office.”   If he constantly hurts people, we don’t have to claim he’s a sociopath, we can just point out that a President shouldn’t have a vast history of stiffing the people who work for him.
And yes, that applies to Hillary too.  You can have valid reasons to believe someone unfit for what is a monumental task; you can also do that without branding them with names that are both inaccurate and unnecessarily target other people who share those illnesses.
And that’s all.
 

See Me In Boston On Labor Day!, Or: My Only East Coast Tour Date!

Because I’d wanted to hit at least one town on the East Coast for the Mighty Fix Book Tour, Angry Robot slotted me in a last-minute signing on Labor Day Weekend.
So if you’d like to see me in New England, well, here’s your chance:
BOSTON!
Sunday, September 4th
Pandemonium Books and Games, , 2:00 pm.
4 Pleasant Street, Cambridge, MA
As usual, I have no idea who lives in Boston – so if you could do me a solid and invite whoever you know is local through the Facebook event, that’d be awesome.  I also don’t know where the hell I’m crashing in Boston on Saturday/Sunday, so if anyone has any free space they can spare that has an actual bed-like thing, that would be Teh Coolness.
And don’t forget the other tour dates, which I am hoping to show up and see your actual faces in!  As usual, I will have donuts, and a Dramatic Reading, and I will go out afterwards to hang out with people ’cause that is how I roll.
CLEVELAND! 
Tuesday, September 6th.
Loganberry Books, 7:00 pm.
13015 Larchmere Blvd, Shaker Heights, OH 44120-1147, United States
SAN FRANCISCO!
Saturday, September 17th.
Borderlands Books, 3 p.m.
866 Valencia St, San Francisco, CA 94110-1739, United States
SAN DIEGO!
Friday, September 23rd.
Mysterious Galaxy, 7:30 p.m.
5943 Balboa Ave Suite 100 San Diego, CA 92111
(With special co-reader J. Patrick Black, author of Ninth City Burning!)
PORTLAND!
Tuesday, September 27th.
Powell’s Books, 7 p.m.
3415 sw cedar hills blvd / beaverton, or 97005
(With special co-reader K.C. Alexander, author of cyberpunk thriller Necrotech!)
SEATTLE!
Thursday, September 29th.
University Of Washington Bookstore, 7 p.m.
4326 University Way NE, Seattle, Washington 98105

Two WorldCon Gripes And A Lotta Love

1) So I had a helluva time at WorldCon, hanging out with tons of people I adore and waving at many many more of them as they passed by in the hallways.  My social anxiety was on low flutter, so mostly I just chatted with people and collected the astoundingly good Pokemon-hunting that Kansas City has to offer.
That said….
2)  While I otherwise loved Pat Cadigan as the host, I cringed every time she (or anyone else) mispronounced – or did not know how to pronounce – someone’s name on stage.  As someone with a funny name, I may be hypersensitive to getting names right.  But in many cases, particularly for people who couldn’t make the convention to attend the George RR Martin afterparty, hearing their name spoken on stage may be the high-water mark of the nomination – that final flash of hope before the winner is announced.
Having that moment be a botch is something that shouldn’t happen.
Yet it did.
Multiple times.
I don’t think it’s too much to ask that the Hugos have phonetic pronunciations of the people’s names printed on the readouts – and if they were, I don’t think it should be too much to ask of the hosts to get them to practice it until they’ve gotten it right.  The Hugo ceremony is usually a fairly informal affair, and I get that, but we should afford the nominees the dignity of getting their name spoken correctly in their moment upon a very large stage.
3)  You might think I’d complain about the Dave Truesdale Dumpster Fire Panel.  (Read the link for details, but the short version is that on a very prestigious panel filled with the best fiction editors SF has to offer, a whacky moderator started with a ten-minute rant on how PC sensitivity was destroying the field – and, ten minutes later, not only had he not introduced his fellow panelists, but he had brought out a box of fake pearl necklaces for people to clutch if they needed to.)
I wouldn’t complain.  That panel was a magnificent icebreaker.  200 people were in attendance, and throughout the night I heard at least twenty of them giving their accounts of the horror.  If you didn’t know what to say to someone, utter the mystic words “Hey, what happened with that panel?” and bam!  Conversation a-go-go.
Dave Truesdale wanted to get people talking.  He did!  Admittedly, it was mostly about what an idiot Dave Truesdale was – but we sure talked!
(Disclaimer: I don’t mind Dave Truesdale going off on his particular brand of wrongness.  I myself have started out moderating panels by starting with an unpopular opinion to get discussions flowing.  But I expressed that opinion in under sixty seconds, and I started by introducing my fellow panelists.  There’s a distinct difference between showing up to start a dialogue and showing up to inflict a monologue – and props like that are part of a monologue designed to alienate.)
4)  Let’s be honest: If I ever got an invite to the Hugo Losers’ Party, I’d go.
But I didn’t, and that party kinda felt like The Room Where It Happens.
I get that the Hugo nominees should have an awesome time afterwards, and I support that!  But though I had a great time barconning and SFWA suite-ing it, I kept seeing people checking their texts – someone had snuck into the Losers’ Party!  Someone said that it had been opened to the general public!  No, wait, that wasn’t it.  Did you know who got in as a plus-one with who?  Someone said…
And I kept seeing people low-grade thinking, “Well, how do I get in there?”  Which felt a bit alienating.  And I wanted to see some of the Hugo nominees and winners to congratulate them, and if they did leave the party they were nowhere to be found.
…which could also be this WorldCon’s weird “room party” issue, which mandated that room parties be held at the convention.  I didn’t hit any.  It was a mile away from the bar. So maybe that’s this WorldCon’s con-space, because the weird thing about conventions is how much the structure of the hotel and the convention space affects who you see at that convention.  (If there’s a bar in the middle of the hotel, then everyone washes up there; if not, a convention tends to be fragmented, with eddies of people catching up with each other in various places.  Do enough cons and you wind up critiquing hotels.)
But the last WorldCon I went to, I saw winners swanning around other parties, and I missed that.  And my (potentially erroneous) impression is that the Sad Puppies have had the unfortunate side effect of elevating the Alfies and the post-Hugo party to a much more exclusive event, and I was sad to not be able to congratulate all my friends and the people I admired in person.
Or maybe that’ll be different at the next WorldCon in Helsinki and I’ll see everyone and be proven wrong.  But for me, the awesomeness of any con is that I can be chatting with some random people, and oh, jeez, hello author of this book I loved, nice to meet you.  And anything that potentially waters down that stewpot experience saddens me.
We’ll see what happens at Helsinki.