The wait is over. Geosynchron is here! Which means that the trilogy which began as a gleam in my bio/logically-enhanced eye way back in 1997 or 1998 is completely in print, and you can now judge the entire story on its merits. Or you can simply stare at the gorgeous Stephan Martiniere cover for hours on end and try to figure out who the heck that guy is sitting Indian style on the cover, which is what I do. (The answer? I really don’t know. I’m guessing it’s either High Executive Len Borda or it’s Ian Holm fresh off the set of The Fifth Element.)

Anyway… boy, am I gonna need your help on this one. This is the last launch of a Jump 225 book, which means it’s the last best time to spread the word about the trilogy. So please, forward to your friends and family members, post reviews online, write blog posts, tweet, spray paint Geosynchron-related graffiti on the front of government buildings! Just tell them that Neil Gaiman sent you.

Oh yeah, and why don’t you read the book too, and let me know how you liked it?

“So, Dave, How Do I Buy Geosynchron?”

Glad you asked. Most writers (the smart ones, at least) will tell you to buy their books in whatever way makes the most sense to you. Amazon and Amazon UK are both selling it (both in paper and on the Kindle). If you’re not partial to Amazon, you can always order from Barnes & Noble or Books-a-Million. Want to support an indie bookstore? Try Borderlands Books, Mysterious Galaxy or Powell’s — or search for it at the independent bookstore nearest you on IndieBound.

If you really feel like going out of your way — and this is totally optional — probably the most helpful thing you could do is to walk into an actual Borders or Barnes & Noble store and ask for Geosynchron by name. If they’re not carrying it, express your shock and amazement loud enough for everyone in the store to hear you, and then special order it from the counter.

Geosynchron: A “Seminal Work of 21st Century SF.”

Man, the critics are saying all kinds of things that are making me blush from my bald head down to my hairy toes. This may be the best-reviewed book of mine to date. Here are the highlights since the last newsletter. And no, I haven’t slept with any of these people.

• Locus Magazine: “This smart, idiosyncratic blend of cyberpunk, libertarian entrepreneurship, and social engineering will, I think, stand as a seminal work of 21st century SF.” (Full Review Forthcoming)
• Fantasy Book Critic: “Geosynchron achieves a rare feat for a trilogy-ending volume, namely it takes the series one level higher, beyond mundanity to true sense-of-wonder SF, so it finally plays on the level of the masters of modern SF… An A+ and so far the best core-SF novel I’ve read in 2010.”
• io9: “More warped than ever… Geosynchron is an engaging conclusion to a thrilling, thought-provoking saga.”
• Library Journal: “Taking cyberpunk to the next level, this conclusion to Edelman’s trilogy… presents a drama of future technology that combines action with psychosocial intrigue. Tension comes as much from the clash of ideas as from physical confrontation. Highly recommended.”
• Grasping for the Wind: “Just amazing. How anyone could make a boardroom discussion so exciting is beyond my comprehension. With words, not lasers, Edelman produces a fiction that has no peer… David Louis Edelman’s Jump 225 trilogy is one of the best space operas currently in print… If you read no other science fiction story this year, read the Jump 225 trilogy.”
• Rob Bedford of SFFWorld: “Today I finished what is, so far, the best SF novel I’ve read this short year and probably best overall — Geosynchron by David Louis Edelman. A fine finale to what is a superb SF trilogy.” (Full Review Forthcoming)

Interviews and Guest Blog Posts.

If reading the reviews isn’t enough for you to get your Geosynchron fix, then click on through to some of these interviews and guest blog posts:

• John Scalzi’s Whatever hosts a “Big Idea” blog from me today about how a scene from Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001 helped inspire the Jump 225 trilogy, and why humanity is powered by dissatisfaction.
• Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist hosted a guest blog from me this week wherein I divulged why the initial letters of the Jump 225 books spell out IMG. (Hint: think HTML.)
• Grinding to Valhalla talks to me about my RPG, videogaming and boardgaming past, the rewarding and not-so-rewarding things about writing, and Yars’ Revenge. Yes, Yars’ Revenge.
• The DC Speculative Fiction Examiner‘s Josh Vogt interviewed me about the writing process, things about the books I would change in retrospect, and which settings of the books I’ve actually visited. (Hint: pretty much none of them.)

GoodReads Jump 225 Giveaway.

GoodReads members can register to win (separately) a signed copy of Infoquake, MultiReal, and Geosynchron. All you have to do is sign up for, or already be a member of, GoodReads. Contest is scheduled to start today and end Friday, March 5. For more details:

• The GoodReads page for Infoquake
• The GoodReads page for MultiReal
• The GoodReads page for Geosynchron

Upcoming Appearances.

• March 19-20: Virginia Festival of the Book, Charlottesville VA.

Thanks for all the support over books 1, 2 and 3! Now go ye and spread the word about Geosynchron. Go thee thou and spreadest the word, I say.

Taking cyberpunk to the next level, this conclusion to Edelman’s trilogy (Infoquake, MultiReal) presents a drama of future technology that combines action with psychosocial intrigue. Tension comes as much from the clash of ideas as from physical confrontation. Highly recommended.

I suppose after Rob Sawyer had me resuscitating cyberpunk with defibrillator paddles in hand, it only made sense for me to take cyberpunk up to the next level. Perhaps next I’ll get to take cyberpunk to its room and hook it up to an IV.

Edelman presents a gritty, tech-heavy thriller that builds on cyberpunk tropes in interesting and detailed new ways. The world developed in 2008′s MultiReal and 2009′s Infoquake has become inflamed with civil war and rebellion as MultiReal, a technology that mathematically projects possible futures to aid in decision making, suddenly becomes inaccessible. Into this chaos, MultiReal-D makes its first tentative appearance… Numerous characters seek their own goals in a labyrinthine plot, but Edelman does manage to bring his disparate threads together to create a coherent and even cohesive conclusion that’s most accessible and satisfying to those who have read the earlier books.

See? Pretty good review, though alas, not a coveted starred review. The spoiler isn’t too irksome, especially if you know that there are four or five other major surprises waiting in the book. PW also messed up the release date for Infoquake — which was the first book of the trilogy and released in 2006, not 2009. But hey, there really isn’t a bad word in there. I’ll take it!

(And hey, did I mention that Geosynchron is available for pre-order at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and IndieBound, among others?)

Normally I wouldn’t comment on a review of my books, but in this case I’ll make an exception. Looks like *someone* read the book, or at least skimmed it, since that bit about “Natch plead[ing] with the Melbourne legislature to no avail” isn’t in the back cover copy. (But to reinforce your point, Ghost of M, she does get that plot point wrong. It’s not Natch, but his mentor Serr Vigal, who pleads before the Melbourne legislature.)

Hard for an author to complain about a 5-star review, though, especially when it’s the only reader review currently up on Amazon…

The discussion continues on from there, and it’s still ongoing.

So now I’ve been inspired to write a little piece here answering the question: what do authors want from reviews of their work anyway? I can’t speak for anybody other than myself on this one, but what I want is very simple:

1. Opinion. Have one. Better yet: have several.
2. Honesty. Love it? Hate it? Moved? Unimpressed? Offended? Enraptured? All I want is your honest opinion, whether it’s favorable to me or not. Don’t worry about the politics, don’t worry about the personalities, don’t worry about what’s popular or unpopular in the stores or what other critics are saying. What do you think?
3. Insight. I want to know that you engaged with my work. Whether you loved it or hated it is not always the point; I want to know that you thought about it. And if my book left you with a soul-crushing emptiness that sucks light out of the universe? That’s fine too, as long as you gave the book a fair shot. Skimmers and summarizers don’t impress me.
4. Elaboration. I can handle the fact that you found the book far-fetched. But I want to know how and where. Specific examples help. Better yet, specific quotations that you took the time to type verbatim from the text.
5. Disclosure. Are you and I up for the same award? Are you the brother of the guy I dissed in an article on my blog? Are you a specialist in the field that I’m writing about? Are you my uncle? None of these things disqualifies you from writing a useful review of my books. I just want to know.
6. No anonymity. There’s a reason Slashdot’s default label for commenters who don’t leave their names is “Anonymous Coward.” Give your review a byline. It doesn’t necessarily have to be your full name or your real name; just don’t say something provocative and then duck behind the shield of anonymity. I want to know something about you; I want to be able to put your opinions about my work in some kind of context.
7. Originality. Anyone can find a detailed summary of MultiReal on the website, or on Amazon, or in other reviews for that matter. Anybody can toss around the phrases “high octane,” “edge of your seat,” and “page turner.” Feel free to confirm impressions that other readers have had, but I’m much more impressed when I see some positive or negative tidbit that I haven’t seen before.
8. Accuracy. Probably not the most important point, but important nonetheless. I can forgive misspellings of minor characters’ names; I can forgive that you said the assassination by beer bottle bludgeoning took place in Barcelona instead of Madrid. But when you completely mangle entire plot threads because you weren’t paying attention, you’re just wasting my time.
9. No pandering. It’s nice to be quotable, and yes, quotable blurbs can often find their way into the front matter of the next book. But please, don’t say pithy things just for the sake of trying to get on the book jacket or the website.
10. No spoilers. It’s not for my sake that you should avoid spoilers; it’s for the sake of my (potential) readers. When a review blithely spoils a suspenseful plot element a third of the way into the novel — like this review of MultiReal from SFRevu does — well, it’s irritating.

By the standards listed above, I’d have to say that the most interesting and plain useful reviews I’ve read of my books are probably Paul Kincaid’s take on Infoquake for the New York Review of Science Fiction, Norman Spinrad’s discussion about Infoquake in Asimov’s, and Jason Pettus’ detailed review of Infoquake on the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography.

Mostly positive reviews, true, but not wholly positive reviews. Paul Kincaid calls Infoquake “a brisk, well-told science fiction adventure set in the normally unadventurous world of business”; but he also takes me to task for the silly character names, the preponderance of appendices, and the backwards-looking historical quotations. He complains about the science. But Kincaid’s review did something that other wholly uncritical five-star reviews did not: it had an impact on the writing of books 2 and 3. Specifically, his point about the improbability of a multi-generational dynasty like the Surinas caused me to rethink certain background elements of the plot that will come to the forefront in Geosynchron. It cast a light on some ideas about the Surinas that I had been toying with beforehand but never quite parsed out.

I don’t know about you, but that’s the kind of impact I want to have on the authors I review.

The sequel to Infoquake builds on the setting and situations established in that novel. It’s a couple of centuries from now and technology has become smaller and more personal, including nanotechnology implanted directly into the human body. As with all new technologies, the uses to which it is put are not necessarily those which were originally foreseen. The protagonist, Natch, has made a breakthrough that could potentially change the world, and he’s been fighting a battle against organizations that sort of blend government and private industry and which seek to control the shape of the future. Although he foiled the opposition in the first book, thanks to some very unusual strategies, his enemies aren’t about to let things go that easily. Since they cannot crush him openly, they opt for a clandestine operation to undermine the company Natch controls from within. The stakes are more than just the financial rewards possible. There is a possibility that the human race could experience a form of freedom previously impossible, but also the chance that they could fall under a tyranny more insidious and irresistible than ever. I suppose you could call this cyberpunk because it’s very much about the interface between people and technology, but it’s also a very perceptive speculative look at how the human potential might be enhanced, or crippled, by its own creations. I look forward to the third book in the trilogy.

As a reminder: MultiReal will be hitting the stores in late July. (In the meantime, you can pre-order on Amazon.)

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.

Fast Forward, the local cable TV show devoted to science fiction based in the Washington, DC area, has given Infoquake a glowing review. The review by Colleen Cahill is not posted on the website, but you can read a text transcript of it. Saith the review, in part:

The far future is often either a place of wonder or disaster in science fiction. There are marvelous views of almost utopias, such as in Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, to dark visions of humanity’s collapse, as in H. G. Well’s The Time Machine. Between these two extremes is David Louis Edelman’s Infoquake from Pyr Books, presenting a future of fantastic advances but one where humanity could be living on the edge of destruction.

Edelman has created a fascinating world… As interesting as his world is, it is Edelman’s characters that make this book shine… The interactions between Natch, Horvil and Jara (who is both attracted to and disturbed by her boss) are volatile, complex and very, very realistic. It is easy to believe in these people, and even feel like maybe this is a future that is not too far away.

Colleen then concludes with a plug for my upcoming novel MultiReal, which I swear was not motivated by an exchange of cash or sexual favors:

Although this title is not a new release, now is a good time to get a copy, as this is Volume 1 of the Jump 225 trilogy and the next volume, Multireal, will be released this July. It would be good to have a few months to ponder Infoquake before plunging into the next work, as I plan to do this summer, exploring more of this utopian/distopia and enjoying a truly compelling tale.

In case you haven’t heard of Fast Forward before, the website is worth perusing, even if you don’t have access to DC area cable channels. The website contains video interviews with an insane amount of excellent SF writers — think William Gibson, Kim Stanley Robinson, China Miéville, Ken MacLeod, Gene Wolfe, and Neil Gaiman, and that’s only from the top third of the video archive. (This month’s interview is with the fabulous Catherine Asaro.)

David Louis Edelman has recreated the excitement of the world of business in his science fiction novel, Infoquake… Edelman has succeeded in making the world of the corporate boardroom into an adventure filled narrative. What John Grisham has done with the legal thriller, Edelman has done with business. Drawing on his experiences in marketing and computer programming, Edelman has created a very thorough world, consistent and detailed…

Infoquake is well-written and well-cadenced. The climax is fulfilling and exciting, yet it is only a speech, and a marketing one at that. Edelman has so well woven the elements of his plot together that Natch’s simple speech has as much power and excitement to it as another science fiction story’s destruction of a spaceship or a fantasy’s evil overlord dying hideously at the hands of a hero. That takes skill to write, and Edelman has it in spades. I highly recommend this novel.

I’ll use this occasion to remind folks out there that review copies of Infoquake are still available from Pyr. In fact, given that MultiReal will be hitting the stores in a few months (not to mention the mass market version of Infoquake from Solaris), this would be an excellent time to start requesting review copies of both Infoquake and MultiReal.

(Questions about review copies? That’s why Al Gore invented email.)

From the old media side of things, the renowned U.K. newspaper The Guardian reviewed The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Volume 2, and gave a nice little shout out to my story “Mathralon.” It’s a capsule review, but I’m told it was very prominently placed in the issue. You can read the review on the Guardian website here, but it’s short enough to post in its entirety (emphasis mine):

Early in 2007 the science-fiction imprint Solaris marked its launch with The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction. A year later, editor George Mann returns with a follow-up, this time featuring strong stories from Kay Kenyon, Michael Moorcock, Mary Robinette Kowal, Eric Brown and others. Highlights include Dan Abnett’s brilliantly deadpan version of humankind’s first encounter with visiting aliens, a mischievous story that defies all established science-fiction convention on the subject. David Louis Edelman’s “Mathralon” is a deliberately dry, unconventionally narrated account of the mining of a rare mineral, a story on a galactic scale which only serves to show what very small worlds we inhabit. You can always rely on Paul Di Filippo to come up with something offbeat in his stories full of charm, quirks and quite breathtaking cleverness. “iCity” is no exception, telling of competitive urban planners vying to win the popular vote and reform entire city districts at the press of a button: in only an hour the cityscape will dissolve and re-emerge to the winning design. Roll on volume three.

And from the world of new media, I finally and at long last have a Wikipedia page. Someone please beef it up to make me look more important and ensure that the WikiVIPdeia don’t take it down. I think I deserve an entry at least as detailed as, say, Portugal’s, don’t you?

(While you’re at it… how is it possible that my friend and Pyr labelmate Kay Kenyon doesn’t have a Wikipedia page of her own? Multiple starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, nominated for the Campbell and Philip K. Dick awards, author of a novel selected as a PW Book of the Year… somebody needs to rectify this.)

(Also while you’re at it… Jon Armstrong is now the only one of this year’s Campbell nominees without a Wikipedia page. He’s a nominee for the Campbell and the Philip K. Dick Award and on the Locus magazine recommended reading list. Go thou forth and createth a page for him, I beseech thee.)

Despite the fact that he’s now a best-selling — nay, legendary — author, I doubt that William Gibson knows much more about international crime and high-tech freelance spies than you or I do. And yet somehow, in his latest novel Spook Country, he manages to not only understand this world, but to extrapolate it and scope out its implications better than anyone else.

Look at how effortlessly he explores a new medium called “locative art.” Locative art is what happens when you mash up GPS units and virtual reality. Think Second Life, if the whole thing was overlaid on top of the real world and accessible through 3D goggles.

The concept of locative art is cool enough. But Gibson’s genius isn’t that he can think up this cool new technology; it’s that he already knows how we’re going to use it. In the first chapter of Spook Country, a locative artist demonstrates the technology by showing a holograph of River Phoenix’s corpse lying face down on the sidewalk — in the exact place where River Phoenix’s corpse actually lay face down on the sidewalk.

Now that’s cool.

(At the risk of self-pimping, let me mention that this locative art technology has a lot of similarities to the multi network I mention in my own novels. Except in my books, the “multi projections” you see in the real world are the result of an imaginary nanotechnological system called the OCHRE network. In Gibson’s book, this is real. Indeed, he supposedly consulted with high-tech wizard Cory Doctorow on the details. You could head out to Radio Shack and build a Spook Country-style work of locative art with a laptop today. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone’s doing it right now.)

The story of Spook Country is really the same story that William Gibson has been telling in all his novels since Neuromancer. It’s remarkable how similar all these books are structured. Take a somewhat jaded young professional, and throw her in the middle of a struggle between mysterious powers way over her head. Sometimes these powers are hyper-intelligent AIs, sometimes they’re multinational corporations, sometimes they’re anonymous government agencies. The conflicts they engage in always involve lots of money being thrown around and the use of cutting-edge technology.

The three jaded POV characters in Spook Country are Hollis Henry, a former cult rock musician turned journalist; Tito, an operative in a boutique Cuban-Chinese crime family; and Milgrim, a junkie who’s been forcibly “recruited” to serve as the translator for a rather vicious CIA type named Brown. Our three protagonists become involved in a clandestine spy game going on between two unnamed freelance espionage forces. What exactly the game is Gibson doesn’t reveal until the book’s final pages, but it involves stolen iPods, geohacking, and a race to locate one very particular crate that’s floating on some ship somewhere in the world. (What’s in the crate? I won’t spoil it, and it doesn’t really matter that much anyway — but I will admit to feeling slightly let down by the revelation.)

In a way, Gibson’s vision of the world isn’t so much different from Philip K. Dick’s. Both envision a world of Little People being tossed around by enormous godlike forces. But while Dick’s characters are paranoid survivors just hanging on to the edge of sanity, Gibson’s have a certain groundedness and indomitable spirit. Hollis Henry and Henry Case and Cayce Pollard and Berry Rydell may not know exactly what game it is they’re playing, but through the course of a Gibson novel they learn how to hustle it. They may get buffeted around by the forces above, but in the end they’re rewarded for it.

It’s interesting how, even though Gibson’s worlds are often called “bleak” and “dystopian,” his novels really don’t deal with moral ambiguity, which is supposed to be a hallmark of modern storytelling. These descriptions are really quite misleading, because he’s actually a very traditional storyteller. Your standard Gibson protagonist is not an anti-hero, and your standard Gibson villains are not sympathetic. We have no trouble in Spook Country identifying who the good guys are and who the bad guys are; the instant you see Brown pushing Milgrim around, you can tell he’s up to no good. Likewise Gibson protagonists aren’t seriously tempted by the Dark Side. They may skirt the law, but they remain decent to the core. (And isn’t the law just a tool of the multinationals anyway?)

One thing to be prepared for in Spook Country is the spareness of the prose. Gibson seems to be moving towards a crisper, punchier style that relies less on intricate wordplay and more on snappy dialog. Most of the chapters are short — sometimes only a page or two long — and they generally end with some kind of twist to get you turning the pages. It’s the kind of tactic you find in the pulpier thrillers that sit next to the supermarket checkout counter, and I might have been disappointed to see Gibson using it if he hadn’t thoroughly mastered the technique better than any supermarket thriller I’ve read.

If there’s a downside to Spook Country, it’s the same downside that mars just about all of Gibson’s novels. He tends to get tangled up in plot somewhere around the two-thirds mark of each book, and you find yourself struggling to just figure out what the heck is going on, much less figuring out what it all means.

But don’t let that scare you off reading Spook Country (or indeed any of Gibson’s works). That just means you might want to flip right back to the first page after you’ve finished to read the book again. Which I’ll certainly be doing soon.