Unscheduled Excursion
Nov. 21st, 2015 10:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
newnumber6Well, I suppose it was scheduled in some ways, but I only decided on it in the last 48 hours before, which pretty much counts as unscheduled to me!
Anyway, last Thursday there was an author reading at the library, featuring Saladin Ahmed (who wrote Hugo-nominated Throne of the Crescent Moon, which I haven't read) and Peter Watts (who wrote also Hugo-nominated Blindsight, among several others). Now I'm a big fan of Watts, Blindsight is one of my favorite books, and he's the only author I regularly follow their blog (though there are a few others that I check in on now and again) and comment there. So I'd wanted to meet him for a while, and get a signature (I wasn't sure at the time whether that was done at these readings, but I brought the book just in case), but there was also a special reason. And for that we need to go to Russia... or, actually, more pointedly, not.
Funny story, that Watts also related in the Q&A portion. The people who published Blindsight in Russia essentially did it on the word of the translator that it was a good book. They only read it after they'd bought the rights and he translated it (which was paid work, of course). After which, they promptly fired him, thinking that it was going to be a book nobody would want to read, dark and cynical with vampires and aliens and a lot of technical jargon. But of course, since most of the costs were already sunk in, they published it in the hopes of recouping some of it. Turns out, five months later they hired the translator back because it was doing very well. (It should be noted, and this may now say as much about Russians as it does about the author, my favorite quote about Watt's work: "When I feel my will to live becoming too strong, I read Peter Watts.") In any event, he's popular in Russia (and a few other countries as well he seems to be more popular than in English), enough that apparently they're releasing a special "commemorative edition" of Blindsight, that contains extra material... a short story that connects the book to the sequel/sidequel Echopraxia that was already published, and something new they commissioned which, at present, has no plans to be published in NA (he didn't actually say, and I didn't think to ask, but typically such deals have a window of exclusivity where only after say six months after it gets released in Russia he'd be allowed to sell it elsewhere)... that was what he was reading at the library, and it'd be the first time anyone other than his close family/friends had heard the entire story (although fragments of it were published on his blog). So, yeah, I wanted to check that out, and overcame my hermit tendencies.
Anyway, I showed up about an hour before they opened the section of the library where it was being held, and wandered around the library's normal circulating SF section just browsing, then when they opened the door, got a good seat. It was a fairly small gathering, maybe 40 people as an upper range, including a few other authors I recognize (Watts' S.O. is a dark fantasy author, and I believe A.M. Dellamonica was there as well). I actually think somebody I have on my LJ friends list was there but I wasn't confident enough to introduce myself just in case. And, one other weird maybe... a woman who looked an awful lot like the grad student who ran the "in-class discussion" segments of my Science Fiction humanities class a decade and a half ago (there were two parts, a weekly lecture with the professors with 300 people or so, and then another weekly or biweekly discussion group, divided into groups of 30 or so students, each led by a grad student, discussing the specific texts, so in a sense she was like my teacher in that). I wish I was bolder so I could have asked and settled it in my brain and said hello.
They begun at 7 (or a little after, there was a third guest scheduled but they got held up at the airport and they were waiting in case they were just caught in transit... turns out they were still at the airport when the other readings were done. I didn't really care though because it was a musical guest, a filk singer), Saladin Ahmed went first, reading a short fantasy story ("Without Faith, Without Law, Without Joy"), about a man trapped in a poem (specifically, Spenser's The Faerie Queen) where he and his brothers are cast as the villain the saintly hero defeats. It was well told, and well read, just not my thing. Then came Watts SF tale investigating various types of group minds and what they may mean for the world which held me with the same power as his novels did. Then there was a short Q&A, which I won't try to sum up, except that I couldn't manage to ask any questions, but it was thoroughly entertaining and occasionally quite funny (and it, combined with the stories themselves, have no set any previous record I've had for "Most F-Bombs heard in a library"). Both speakers did a good job (and they bounced off each other quite well).
After that they did say that anyone who had books could come up and get them signed, and I waited in a short line, then introduced myself as one of the commenters from his blog (he seemed to recognize me, although largely because he initially thought, when I was commenting on the blog, I was somebody else he knew with the same first name and last name initial), and he signed my book and answered another brief question, but then I ducked out rather than eavesdropping in on the conversations of others getting signed.
Still, it was an excursion, and now I can briefly consider myself one of the, at most, 50 or so people who've read/heard the entire canon of that universe that's been released to date!
Anyway, last Thursday there was an author reading at the library, featuring Saladin Ahmed (who wrote Hugo-nominated Throne of the Crescent Moon, which I haven't read) and Peter Watts (who wrote also Hugo-nominated Blindsight, among several others). Now I'm a big fan of Watts, Blindsight is one of my favorite books, and he's the only author I regularly follow their blog (though there are a few others that I check in on now and again) and comment there. So I'd wanted to meet him for a while, and get a signature (I wasn't sure at the time whether that was done at these readings, but I brought the book just in case), but there was also a special reason. And for that we need to go to Russia... or, actually, more pointedly, not.
Funny story, that Watts also related in the Q&A portion. The people who published Blindsight in Russia essentially did it on the word of the translator that it was a good book. They only read it after they'd bought the rights and he translated it (which was paid work, of course). After which, they promptly fired him, thinking that it was going to be a book nobody would want to read, dark and cynical with vampires and aliens and a lot of technical jargon. But of course, since most of the costs were already sunk in, they published it in the hopes of recouping some of it. Turns out, five months later they hired the translator back because it was doing very well. (It should be noted, and this may now say as much about Russians as it does about the author, my favorite quote about Watt's work: "When I feel my will to live becoming too strong, I read Peter Watts.") In any event, he's popular in Russia (and a few other countries as well he seems to be more popular than in English), enough that apparently they're releasing a special "commemorative edition" of Blindsight, that contains extra material... a short story that connects the book to the sequel/sidequel Echopraxia that was already published, and something new they commissioned which, at present, has no plans to be published in NA (he didn't actually say, and I didn't think to ask, but typically such deals have a window of exclusivity where only after say six months after it gets released in Russia he'd be allowed to sell it elsewhere)... that was what he was reading at the library, and it'd be the first time anyone other than his close family/friends had heard the entire story (although fragments of it were published on his blog). So, yeah, I wanted to check that out, and overcame my hermit tendencies.
Anyway, I showed up about an hour before they opened the section of the library where it was being held, and wandered around the library's normal circulating SF section just browsing, then when they opened the door, got a good seat. It was a fairly small gathering, maybe 40 people as an upper range, including a few other authors I recognize (Watts' S.O. is a dark fantasy author, and I believe A.M. Dellamonica was there as well). I actually think somebody I have on my LJ friends list was there but I wasn't confident enough to introduce myself just in case. And, one other weird maybe... a woman who looked an awful lot like the grad student who ran the "in-class discussion" segments of my Science Fiction humanities class a decade and a half ago (there were two parts, a weekly lecture with the professors with 300 people or so, and then another weekly or biweekly discussion group, divided into groups of 30 or so students, each led by a grad student, discussing the specific texts, so in a sense she was like my teacher in that). I wish I was bolder so I could have asked and settled it in my brain and said hello.
They begun at 7 (or a little after, there was a third guest scheduled but they got held up at the airport and they were waiting in case they were just caught in transit... turns out they were still at the airport when the other readings were done. I didn't really care though because it was a musical guest, a filk singer), Saladin Ahmed went first, reading a short fantasy story ("Without Faith, Without Law, Without Joy"), about a man trapped in a poem (specifically, Spenser's The Faerie Queen) where he and his brothers are cast as the villain the saintly hero defeats. It was well told, and well read, just not my thing. Then came Watts SF tale investigating various types of group minds and what they may mean for the world which held me with the same power as his novels did. Then there was a short Q&A, which I won't try to sum up, except that I couldn't manage to ask any questions, but it was thoroughly entertaining and occasionally quite funny (and it, combined with the stories themselves, have no set any previous record I've had for "Most F-Bombs heard in a library"). Both speakers did a good job (and they bounced off each other quite well).
After that they did say that anyone who had books could come up and get them signed, and I waited in a short line, then introduced myself as one of the commenters from his blog (he seemed to recognize me, although largely because he initially thought, when I was commenting on the blog, I was somebody else he knew with the same first name and last name initial), and he signed my book and answered another brief question, but then I ducked out rather than eavesdropping in on the conversations of others getting signed.
Still, it was an excursion, and now I can briefly consider myself one of the, at most, 50 or so people who've read/heard the entire canon of that universe that's been released to date!
