This Saturday!

Waaaay back in early May, io9.com put up a post restarting their online book club, and their book of choice was The Red. There hasn’t been any promotion or reminders on it since then, but the promised Q&A session is going to take place on Saturday, putting it a couple of weeks behind the original schedule.

I think the Q&A is going to work something like a Reddit AMA. A post will go up at io9.com, probably around noon EDT. In theory, people who have read the book will pop in to post questions, and I’ll stop by a little bit later to try to answer them.

The problem with this set up of course is that it’s very hit-or-miss about who happens to notice the Q&A, and of those, who’s actually read the book. It’s also on a Saturday when, weirdly enough, a lot of people are not online.

So it’s basically fallen to me to generate my own audience (and that never goes well!). So if you’ve read The Red, if you’re up for an online Q&A/discussion, if you’ve got the time, please come on over to io9.com this Saturday! I’d love to have your company there.

I’ll post a link here on the blog when I have one.

Update: Follow this link to io9.com!

Two interviews are just out this week:

Over at SF Signal I answer questions posed by book reviewer and writer Anthony Vicino. Topics covered include the contrasts between indie and traditional publishing, military science fiction, and Going Dark. I think this is one of my better interviews. I hope you check it out!

And at the B&N Sci-Fi and Fantasy Blog you’ll find the Don’t-Mess-With-Texas interview, titled “Mission Complete: Discussing The Red Trilogy with Linda Nagata”. Here Andrew Liptak asks questions about all three books in the series, and what I’m doing next.

The Functional Nerds is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with science fiction and fantasy authors, artists, and more. I had the privilege of being a guest of the show back in May 2014. Patrick Hester and John Anealio are looking to expand their offerings, lacking only the funding to make it happen. So if you’re into SFF podcasts, do consider a contribution to The Functional Nerds Patreon project.

Another link round up, but these are more personal:

Over at SF Signal, I chat with Paul Weimer about the Red Trilogy, artificial intelligence, and my weird writing career:

LN: The problem with the term “artificial intelligence” is that it means different things in different contexts, and to different people. In science fiction the standard trope is a complex computer program that becomes self-aware and begins to act like a human, and thereby becomes a pain in the ass—which isn’t a very useful transformation, from a practical perspective.

If you missed it, I’ve also got another recent interview up at SFRevu. Ernest Lilley asks some insightful questions.

Linda: I tend not to use the term “soft science fiction” because the meaning seems to change depending on circumstance. In my own mind, I see science fiction as a continuum between hard science fiction and space fantasy. At the harder end of the spectrum, technology in a story is more or less plausible and attempts are made not to violate basic laws of nature. Some say hard SF is focused on the technology, but for me, that’s not the defining characteristic. My stories aren’t about the technology. They’re about the characters and how their lives are affected by that technology.

And Kristine Kathryn Rusch has a blog post just up explaining what inspired her to put together a Storybundle themed around women in science fiction.

Suffice it to say that it became apparent to me that from the young writer/reader point of view, women didn’t write science fiction, because by the year 2000, most of the sf by women had gone out of print and was almost impossible to find.

Nerds of a Feather, Flock Together is a fanzine that includes reviews of science fiction, fantasy, crime, and horror fiction, plus film and video game reviews. They also run some special features, with the most recent being the “6 Books” interview. Writers are asked six questions about the books they’re reading, will read, or wrote.

So far the series has included James Cambias, Django Wexler, and me.

So check it out! It’s a great way to find new books. I know, because I read the interviews and immediately downloaded a sample of Cambias’s new novel Corsair. Looks intriguing!

Here’s a link to all three interviews. Let me know what you think.

A number of Spanish blogs have been participating in a special project during the month of April devoted to women in science fiction and fantasy. It’s called “The Gender and the Genre” and I have the privilege of being part of it, through an interview conducted by Cristina Jurado, from the blog Más Ficción Que Ciencia, and writer and reviewer Elías Combarro (@odo on twitter) of Sense of Wonder.

Cristina and Elías composed the questions, and then Cristina translated my responses into Spanish.

You can find the English version of the interview here at Sense of Wonder.

And the Spanish version is here at Más Ficción Que Ciencia and mirrored here at El Fantascopio.

Also check out Elías’s review of The Bohr Maker (Spanish only).