New “Infoquake” and “MultiReal” Audio Podcasts

Well, it took me long enough.

I intended to finish podcasting the first seven chapters of Infoquake about two years ago, when the book was first released in trade paperback. For one reason or another, I only got up to chapter 4. I blame it on the cocaine, or the Extended Edition of The Fellowship of the Ring, or perhaps Martians.

But I never forget a promise! (I do sometimes ignore them, but that’s not the same thing.) And so, after much distraction and delay, tonight I have finally posted the complete chapters 1 through 7 of Infoquake in audio read by the author. You can listen in MP3 format, you can make Steve Ballmer happy and listen in Windows Media format, or you can make Cory Doctorow happy and listen in open source Ogg Vorbis format.

In fact, I had such a ball finishing up the audio excerpts for Infoquake that I went ahead and recorded chapter 1 of MultiReal in audio as well. I intend to record chapters 2 through 8 of MultiReal soon, so you’ll be able to listen to the full excerpt on your iPod while you jog.

Hopefully I’ll be able to put together some giveaway CDs packed with both podcasts, downloads, and lots of other cool stuff as well. And then the CDs will go into circulation, they’ll get passed all around the country, my books will sell like naked chocolate money, Brad Bird will get a hold of one of my CDs, and he’ll be so enamored of my voice that he’ll cast me as the lead in an upcoming Pixar movie. Hey, it happened to Patton Oswalt, didn’t it?

More Newfound Reviews

After seeing the rush of new reviews for Infoquake, I decided to do a round of vanity Googling and found several more that I had been unaware of. Yes, I know how unusual it is for me to blog three times in one day. But don’t worry, after today I promise I’ll go back to sporadically throwing out blog pieces about random topics at no fixed interval.

The book cover for Indian Larry: Chopper Shaman here has no relation to any of these book reviews. I just stumbled upon it while Googling and found it amusing. Tell me Indian Larry isn’t the coolest guy on the planet. Go ahead, tell me. No, I don’t believe you. You’re lying.

Now, the new reviews:

Graeme Flory of Graeme’s Fantasy Book Review recently reviewed The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Volume Two, and called my story “Mathralon” one of his two favorites in the collection. “George Mann’s second collection of science fiction makes for some enthralling reading of other worlds and the people who inhabit them,” says Graeme. “…My favourite stories were Dan Abnett’s ‘Point of Contact’ and David Louis Edelman’s ‘Mathralon’, two tales that leave the reader in no doubt as to how cold and lonely our universe can be.”

Not really a review, but the Antiaging Wellness Blog uses Infoquake as a starting point for a brief essay about biological programming. “In reading through the programs used in Infoquake, it is hard not to ask oneself, are these not the very mechanisms that the body is designed to control itself, through our hormonal and neurological pathways.”

Don D’Ammassa apparently long ago posted a capsule outtake review of Infoquake, which I completely failed to notice at the time. Says Don: “Lots of interesting speculation and a plausible and interesting plot. I found the prose a bit awkward from time to time but not so much that it significantly interfered with my enjoyment of the story.”

Some Amazon reviewer apparently has been using his copy of Infoquake as a makeshift Frisbee. Says Ray A.R. “Abe” in his 1-star review: “This is one of two supposedly highly rated books I read lately that were completely awful. I read the whole thing but wished I’d stopped after the third time I threw the book across the room. Take out the technojunk and this is nothing but a subpar novel, weak on character, weak on plot. Suffice to say I’ll never read another thing written by this awful author.” FYI, the other highly rated book that “Abe” disliked was Pat Rothfuss’ The Name of the Wind.

Continuing my bad streak of reviews on the Barnes & Noble page for Infoquake, Karmen Roth echoes Abe’s sentiments about the book: “Very unoriginal, poorly written and chock full of junk technotalk that serves no purpose. By the end, there wasn’t a single character I cared about and the story didn’t seem to go anywhere.” To which I say: Oh yeah? Well, wait until you read MultiReal. It’s even more unoriginal, more poorly written, and every single word is junk technotalk that not only serves no purpose, but actively finds out your purpose and sabotages it.

Pat on “Infoquake”: “One of the Very Best SF Debuts I Have Ever Read”

Pat of Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist (and of the aforeblogged giveaway contest) has given my novel Infoquake the kind of rave review that every author wants to get. I can’t believe nobody paid the guy money for this. (Right? I mean, I didn’t pay him anything…)

Some excerpts:

David Louis Edelman’s Infoquake just might be one of the very best science fiction debuts I have ever read. The book deserves all the praise it has garnered, and then some! Only rarely will a debut author produce the sort of work which habitually comes from celebrated veterans…

Contrary to a majority of scifi yarns, its the characterization which carries Infoquake forward. Though Natch is a captivating character, the supporting cast is equally interesting, with characters such as Jara, Horvil and Quell. I’m really looking forward to learning more about each of them in the two sequels…

Ambitious, vast in scope, with a deftly executed plot and impeccable prose from start to finish, David Louis Edelman’s Infoquake is a fascinating read. 2006 was one of the best years in memory in terms of impressive speculative fiction debuts. Had I read it when it was originally released, Infoquake would have trumped Scott Lynch’s The Lies of Locke Lamora, Naomi Novik’s His Majesty’s Dragon, Brian Ruckley’s Winterbirth, and Joe Abercrombie’s The Blade Itself.

He concludes by giving the book a solid 8 out of 10 and then makes a pitch for the imminently arriving sequel MultiReal as well.

“One of the very best science fiction debuts I have ever read”? Hah! Take that, Dune, Ender’s Game, and Neuromancer, not to mention Frankenstein. I’m crashing your party. Let’s hope you’re stocked up on Doritos.

“Infoquake” Giveaway on Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist

I may be posting this too late… but I discovered the other day that Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist is giving away five copies of the Solaris mass market paperback of Infoquake. Read the entry on the website for more information about how to enter. There’s no information about when the contest ends, so you’d better hustle over there if you’re hoping to win one.

Pat has promised a review of Infoquake in the coming days, but in the meantime he has this to say: “I’m more than halfway through the novel, and it’s a terrific read thus far! Edelman has been nominated for the second time for the John W. Campbell Award, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he wins it this year.” (Actually, it’s my first nomination for the Best New Writer Campbell, but who’s counting?)

Whatta Fiasco… The Book’s Got a Glossary!

While I’m doling out unflattering reviews, here’s another unflattering review of Infoquake from Sam of the Whatta Fiasco blog. This one’s short enough to cite in its entirety:

There were parts of this book that had me excited and intrigued, but then things would wander off into emotional dead ends. The tech and some of the social ideas were cool and nifty, but the business model stuff just never made it for me. And a glossary in the back? That’s just never a good sign. There are plenty of interesting bits in there and lots of promise, but the book as a whole just never gelled for me.

Most of the review I can just kind of shrug and say, “Well, if it ain’t your cup of tea, it ain’t your cup of tea.” But I’m a little puzzled by the comment about the glossary. Glossary = bad?

It’s not the first time I’ve heard this sentiment. A few other reviewers of Infoquake have stated that the book had a strike against it from the outset just by including a glossary and appendices. For another example, here’s what Paul Kincaid had to say in his (generally quite positive) review of Infoquake for The New York Review of Science Fiction last year:

Occasionally we have become used to extraneous material being introduced, a list of characters in a sprawling Russian novel or a map in a second-rate fantasy, but generally the more an author feels the need for this material the more justified we are in feeling that the author has failed in the primary task of telling it all in the story. David Louis Edelman has devoted the last 40 pages of his novel to no fewer than six addenda, including a glossary, a timeline, a history of the Surina family, a (cod) explanation of the (cod) science in the book and so on. There is nothing in any of these addenda that should not have been crystal clear through the story alone.

I don’t understand this sentiment, and I’m wondering how widespread it is. I mean, The Lord of the Rings, Dune, A Clockwork Orange, 1984, and The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant all have glossaries, to name a few off the top of my head. Do they have strikes against them too?

I can’t speak for why Mssrs. Tolkien, Herbert, Burgess, Blair, and Donaldson included appendix material in their books. For Tolkien, the humbug-scholarship aspect of Middle Earth was clearly central to his work. (See my post about Tolkien’s Unfinished Tales for more on this.) Herbert’s seem like something of an afterthought.

For me, the appendices were a way of compromising with the reader. Personally, I tend to enjoy the long-winded infodumps in stories. My favorite chapter in The Lord of the Rings? “The Council of Elrond.” My favorite part of The Matrix? Morpheus’ explanation to Neo about the world of the machines (followed by that near-incomprehensible speech by The Architect in The Matrix: Reloaded).

If I had written Infoquake solely for my own benefit, I would have filled it with chapter after chapter of people lounging around talking about the ethical implications of multi technology over dinner. But given that I’m writing stories for other people to enjoy, I realized that it would help move the story along if I excised some of these narratives from the story proper. Moving them into appendices seemed like a nice way to keep the rising tension while still satisfying the irrepressibly curious.

(As for the glossary? The world of Jump 225 is quite complex and filled with invented buzzwords, I’ll admit. That part of the story is entirely intentional, and meant to both reflect on and satirize our own society. Imagine how many footnotes you’d need to explain to a resident of 1965 how you used your Blackberry’s GPS to track down the closest Mickey D’s from an address you got on Google.)

It might sound like I’m starting to get defensive here, but I’m really not. I don’t get mad at people who have problems with my books, I get curious. So. The sentiment that glossaries and appendices are to be avoided. What to make of it?

My initial temptation was to write it off as the opinion of someone who doesn’t want to read anything they have to think about too hard. (Honestly, the reader who picks up Infoquake at the airport just because they want to stay awake on the plane isn’t a reader I care too much about.) But that’s clearly unfair to the two reviewers cited above. The NY Review reviewer clearly engaged with the material, even if he had some problems with it. And from what I can tell by browsing through his blog, the Whatta Fiasco guy seems to be well-read, engages with the material, and has generally good taste.

But after giving it some more careful thought, here are what seem to me to be plausible reasons an intelligent and engaged reader would object to seeing lengthy glossaries and appendices in the back of a book:

1. It’s a sign that the author is taking him- or herself too seriously.

2. It’s a sign that the author is really in dire need of a good editor.

3. It’s a sign that the author is falling prey to the (perceived) genre shortcoming of unnecessary complexity.

4. It’s a sign that the author is too lazy to introduce these terms organically into the body of the story.

5. It’s a sign that either the author, the editor, or the publisher don’t trust the reader’s intelligence enough to remember the important terms in the story.

Any that I’m missing? Any thoughts from glossary-lovers or -haters out there?