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.

The website for Geosynchron is live at www.geosynchron.net. See screen capture here (and more below the cut).

Not only will you find a spiffy website design that matches those of the first two book sites, you’ll also find:

• Chapters 1 through 8 in their entirety, or the entire first section of the book (titled “The Prisoners”). Wonder what happened to Quell after he got dragged out of the Revelation Spire by the Defense and Wellness Council? Wonder what happened to Natch after he blacked out on the streets of Old Chicago? Want to know what the “MultiReal-D” code that Petrucio Patel shot Natch with in the Tul Jabbor Complex does? Find out now.
• An updated glossary that contains all of the terms from all three books. (You might have noticed that the glossaries in the actual books themselves have been trimmed slightly to only include terms pertinent to that particular book.)
• Three new appendices from Geosynchron: “On the Islanders”, “On the Pharisees” and “On the Autonomous Revolt”. Here you can read about how the Band of Twelve founded the Luddite civilization in the Pacific Islands, the history of the Three Jesuses, details about the Islanders’ Dogmatic Oppositions, and details about the AI revolt that nearly destroyed humanity. One of these appendices contains a spoiler, but you won’t recognize it as such until after you’ve finished Geosynchron.
• The Afterword to the Trilogy, straight out of the back of Geosynchron. Read about how my politics affected the story, how 9/11 changed everything, regrets I have about the trilogy, and why rejecting Infoquake because the opening chapters are libertarian propaganda is kind of like rejecting Star Wars because the first 20 minutes glorify Darth Vader. (Warning: some spoilers here about what happens at the end of Geosynchron.)
• A reviews page that right now only features three reviews, and one of those is by Harriet Klausner so it hardly counts. But the page also contains a link to Fantasy Book Critic contributor Liviu Suciu’s review on GoodReads, in which he calls the book “the best mundane SF has to offer.”

Keep your eye on this space for more stuff to come, including details about cons I’ll be attending, interviews I’ll be doing, and giveaways for the complete signed Jump 225 trilogy. Go thou and retweet, blog, spread the word.

Oh yeah, and why not preorder on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Powell’s or IndieBound?

It’s worth reminding folks that the book comes out in late February, 2010 (but is already available for pre-order at all of your favorite book shopping venues).

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?)

Friday, October 16

• 7:00 PM: LibraryThing, Goodreads, and Other Book Conversations
  Participants: Colleen Cahill (m), David Louis Edelman, C. Alan Loewen, Karen Newton
  The annual panel on online book social media, which Capclave has put me on for four years running now. Guess I haven’t made too much of a fool of myself on this panel.
• 9:00 PM: Books (and Writers) Past their Expiration Date
  Participants: Allen Wold (m), John Betancourt, David Louis Edelman, Kathy Morrow, Darrell Schweitzer, Ted White

  A discussion about why books and authors go out-of-date and/or out-of-style.

Saturday, October 17

• 4:00 PM: Even Hard SF Uses FTL
  Participants: David Louis Edelman (m), Eric Choi, Michael Flynn, Ed Lerner, James Maxey
  For some reason, somebody decided I should moderate this panel. Perhaps it’s because Norman Spinrad wrote in Asimov’s that “Edelman seems to have convincing and convincingly detailed knowledge of the physiology and biochemistry of the human nervous system down to the molecular level. And cares about making his fictional combination of molecular biology and nanotech credible.” (I never get tired of that quote.)
• 7:30 PM: Reading from Geosynchron
  This will be the first public reading from my upcoming Geosynchron. I plan to read chapter 3, which features Quell the Islander running around shooting people with black code in prison. You’ve been warned.

Sunday, October 18

• 12:00 PM: Book Signing
  Alongside Allen Wold and Yoji Kondo. So, um, bring your books and I’ll sign them. Or better yet, buy new books and I’ll sign them.
• 2:00 PM: Post Consumer Economy
  Participants: James Maxey (m), Lenny Bailes, David Louis Edelman, Tom King, Kathy Morrow
  I keep asking to be put on these futuristic economy panels, despite the fact that I know almost nothing about economics, largely because I keep thinking it will help promote my books.

Hope to see you there!

This trilogy that began with something I dashed off on a laptop back in 1997 or 1998 is now, more or less, finished. Complete. Finito. I have some line editing and a couple of appendices still to write (“On the Islanders” and “On the Pharisees,” if you must know). But it’s a complete story.

Here are some of the things you can expect from Geosynchron, the concluding volume of the Jump 225 trilogy, when it hits the stores in late February-ish of 2010. (Pre-order it on Amazon here.) I’m going to try to keep this light on the spoilers, so don’t worry that I’ll ruin something crucial. But if you’d rather go into the book completely blind, then, you know, stop reading. Duh.

Some of what you’ll see in Geosynchron:

• Natch imprisoned in a windowless chamber where MultiReal is useless and “time has become unpredictable”
• A ruinous civil war between Len Borda and Magan Kai Lee, including some actual large-scale battle scenes
• A five-chapter-long climax involving a military strike, a MultiReal choice cycle battle, a covert mission, and (of course) creative advertising and marketing techniques
• Quell again giving a one-man exhibition in whoopassery (this time with a dartgun and his bare mitts)
• My homage to the Council of Elrond in The Lord of the Rings: an 18-person, 8,276-word Council of Magan Kai Lee
• A court battle between Jara’s fiefcorp and Margaret Surina’s unscrupulous cousins, Jayze and Suheil
• The introduction of several new characters, including:
  • Richard Taylor, Pharisee and member of the Faithful Order of the Children Unshackled
  • Josiah, son of Quell and novice representative in the Islander parliament
  • Bali Chandler and Triggendala, seasoned representatives in the Islander parliament
  • Plithy, a young punk caught in a Council orbital prison
  • Rodrigo and Molloy, a black code junkie and a black code dealer
  • Martika Korella, an attorney in Andra Pradesh
• Horvil imploring Jara to have sex with him in a Sigh environment called “Vat of Baked Beans”
• The truth behind the Autonomous Revolt that devastated humanity hundreds of years ago (hint: it involves blood sacrifice)
• The truth behind Quell’s thirty years in the compound at Andra Pradesh
• The truth behind the infoquakes that have been wreaking havoc since midway through book 1
• A political manifesto by Quell’s son Josiah, which explains the concept of Grand Reunification
• Events that happen and then unhappen, as well as events that take place in virtual time
• Chapters set in:
  • 49th Heaven, the orbital colony known for its licentiousness
  • Sao Paulo, home to the Patel Brothers
  • Manila, capital of the Free Republic of the Pacific Islands
  • Orbital Detention and Rehabilitation Facility, 12th Meridian, a Council prison
• An ending that’s — well, unique, being that it consists of six chapters that are 95% dialogue
• The climactic confrontation between Natch and Brone that you’ve all been waiting for
• The fate of the world being put to a vote by… the drudges?

A few interesting facts about Geosynchron:

• The current length of the book is 138,244 words; add in the as-yet-unfinished appendices, acknowledgments and afterwords, and the total will probably be around 145,000 words. Slightly shorter than MultiReal’s 150,000 words, a bit longer than Infoquake’s 122,000 words.
• The book is once again divided into six sections:
  1. The Prisoners
  2. A Game of Chess
  3. The Consultants
  4. Nohwan’s Crusade
  5. Tyrants and Revolutionaries
  6. The Guardian and the Keeper
• Geosynchron contains 42 chapters. The shortest chapter (Chapter 1) is 646 words long; the longest chapter (Chapter 30) is a whopping 8,276 words. (I am, however, considering splitting that chapter in two, even though the Douglas Adams fan in me recoils at the thought of adding a 43rd chapter.)
• The first sentence: “Margaret Surina is rejuvenated.”
• The book’s epigraph is a quote from John Steinbeck’s East of Eden: “Not every man is defeated. I can name you a dozen who were not, and those are the ones the world lives by.”

After reading all this, you might be asking the question, Is he really going to tie up all of those loose ends in one book? This isn’t one o’ them Robert Jordan-type situations, is it? And my answers to these questions are Yes, for the most part and No.

Geosynchron will end the Jump 225 trilogy. Meaning, the three primary stories I’m trying to tell with this trilogy will conclude at the end of this book. (For the record, those stories are: 1. Natch’s attempts to break free from his utter self-absorption, 2. Jara’s attempts to find value in herself, 3. A world trying to cope with out-of-control technological change.) Does that mean you’re going to see a nice, tidy conclusion where I summarize what every character does for the rest of their lives, Animal House style? Nope. If you’re looking for neat, foursquare endings to all of the plotlines in the trilogy, you’ll be disappointed.

I’m not going to preclude writing more in this universe at some date in the future. But at present, I’ve said all that I’ve got to say in this universe. There are other milieus and other genres that I’d like to take a stab at. There’s this YA fantasy series I’ve been itching to write since the late ’90s about an English boy who attends a school for wizards. I’m not too late, am I?

(Oh yeah, and hopefully this means I’ll have a little bit of time to blog again. Hopefully.)

The cover painting is once again by the incomparable Hugo Award-winning artist Stephan Martiniere, whose paintings for the covers of Infoquake and MultiReal have been blowing minds for many a month.

And here is the catalog copy for the book, which provides something of a spoiler (though a necessary one) for the cliffhanger at the end of MultiReal.

DAVID LOUIS EDELMAN’S BUSINESS SCIENCE FICTION SAGA THAT BEGAN WITH INFOQUAKE AND MULTIREAL COMES TO A STUNNING CONCLUSION WITH GEOSYNCHRON, THE LAST BOOK OF THE JUMP 225 TRILOGY.

The Defense and Wellness Council is enmeshed in full-scale civil war between Len Borda and the mysterious Magan Kai Lee. Quell has escaped from prison and is stirring up rebellion in the Islands with the aid of a brash young leader named Josiah. Jara and the apprentices of the Surina/Natch MultiReal Fiefcorp still find themselves fighting off legal attacks from their competitors and from Margaret Surina’s unscrupulous heirs — even though MultiReal has completely vanished.

The quest for the truth will lead to the edges of civilization, from the tumultuous society of the Pacific Islands to the lawless orbital colony of 49th Heaven; and through the deeps of time, from the hidden agenda of the Surina family to the real truth behind the Autonomous Revolt that devastated humanity hundreds of years ago.

Meanwhile, Natch has awakened in a windowless prison with nothing but a haze of memory to clue him in as to how he got there. He’s still receiving strange hallucinatory messages from Margaret Surina and the nature of reality is buckling all around him. When the smoke clears, Natch must make the ultimate decision — whether to save a world that has scorned and discarded him, or to save the only person he has ever loved: himself.

I’ll have more to say about this later, but figured that it couldn’t hurt to just post this stuff asap.

(Oh, and if you’re so inclined, the book’s now available for pre-order on Amazon.)

Fast Forward, the Arlington, VA-based cable science fiction TV show, conducted a 19-minute interview with me a couple of weeks ago. (Video requires QuickTime 7, but there’s an audio-only version available too.) Interviewer Tom Schaad really seems to have read Infoquake and MultiReal carefully. In our discussion before the cameras started rolling, he picked up on a number of hints in the margins of the books that nobody else has remarked on. (Hint: In which orbital colony did noted philanderer Marcus Surina die? And in which orbital colony was a certain fatherless character born?) Topics in the interview proper include MultiReal, technological paradigm shifts, the difficulty of writing the middle book in a trilogy, ethical systems in a post-religious world, and how the Jump 225 Trilogy is all about trying to find balance.

And blogger Fábio Fernandes has posted a seven-question interview with me on Post-Weird Thoughts. Topics covered include the influence of Dune and William Gibson, my favorite novels, the timeline of the Jump 225 trilogy in relation to today, and Geosynchron. Quick excerpt:

What can we expect of Geosynchron, the next novel of the Infoquake series? (BTW, it will really be a trilogy or there will be other stories in that universe?)

Geosynchron will definitely be the last novel of the trilogy. (I’m not precluding the possibility of writing additional novels in this universe down the road, but this particular story will come to an end at the conclusion of book 3.) As for what’s in store in the final book… You’re going to see the characters go off to places we haven’t been before, like the Pacific Islands and the orbital colony of 49th Heaven. You’re going to meet some of the Pharisees. You’re going to see a lot more of Quell and delve into his relationship with Margaret Surina. And you’re going to see a big ending that involves military strikes, philosophical debate, and (of course) creative marketing techniques. I think I can promise that it’s going to be a very, very unique conclusion. Currently the schedule is for the book to hit the stores in early 2010.

I’m told that Post-Weird Thoughts will have reviews of Infoquake and MultiReal up shortly as well.

Go. Watch. Read. Contemplate. Comment.

Update 12/20/08 @ 5:07 pm: Added embedded Google video.

The book measures 477 pages, or about 148,000 words (including appendices). There are 6 sections, 45 chapters, and 8 appendices. The opening epigraph comes from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” The tagline? “Infinite possibility is only a state of mind.”

Now, when I say the book is done, of course that doesn’t mean it’s absolutely, completely done. That means it’s going off to my editor at Pyr, Lou Anders, for any last-minute comments. I’ll be printing out another copy of the book for myself and giving it a last read-through with red pen in hand. I’ll be incorporating those changes by the end of the month — and then the book goes off to the copy editor. But I expect the changes to be pretty minor from this point on.

(Want to know how finicky I am? The printouts after the jump below showing some of my line edits to MultiReal are from the fourth complete draft of the book.)

Here’s an example of the kind of changes I’m talking about. I discovered yesterday that, after who knows how many read-throughs and rewrites, in chapter 45 one of my characters was “threading her way through the throngs of Thasselians.” I’ll admit I’m not always above allocating an assortment of alliteration in my writing, but this one was totally unintentional. And it sounded ridiculous, so it needed to be fixed. (The even more ridiculous part is that I had misspelled “throngs” as “thongs.” Freudian slip?)

So having completed the book, I can definitely say this: you have never, ever read a book like MultiReal before.

MultiReal might be the most exciting book you’ve ever read that contains both a series of Congressional speeches and a three-way dartgun battle. It has both a granular discussion about the ethics of different software pricing models and a virtual sex scene with four-breasted mermaids.

To give you an idea of how complex this book is, chew on this: there are three main point-of-view characters, three minor point-of-view characters, one chapter in epistolary form, and one chapter from the global omniscient point of view. The prose slips from past to present tense a few times. You’re going to learn that one important piece of history mentioned in Infoquake didn’t quite happen the way you think it happened. Some of the characters speak in code. More than one have double allegiances. Oh, and have I mentioned the multiple, alternate, simultaneous, and asynchronous realities?

The plot bobs and weaves around, with a number of false starts and red herrings. There really isn’t one single narrative thread running through the book like there was in Infoquake. It’s still largely Natch’s story, of course, but Jara’s going to come much further into the foreground. And by the time the book comes to a close, you’re not going to know who the good guys are and who the bad guys are, or whether some of them are still alive. If I’m counting correctly, there will be a total of eight different competing factions by the end.

In other words: MultiReal is designed to be trippy, challenging, and more than a little disorienting. One of the major themes of the book is the difficulty of making tough decisions based on incomplete information — and what if you didn’t have to? So if I’ve done my job correctly, you the reader will get a taste of what the characters are going through.

It’s a delicate tightrope for a writer to walk. The book has to be daunting enough to surprise you and confuse you at times; but it also has to be easy enough to follow that you don’t need a pad of graph paper and a scientific calculator. It’s got to have the meat of a grand political saga, the seasoning of a science fiction thriller, and the special sauce of old-school Wired magazine.

But that’s not to say MultiReal won’t be a lot of fun. You’ll meet a Natch look-alike named Geronimo who plays for a band called Dregs of Nitro. You’ll see Robby Robby with a big, frizzy Afro. You’ll see Quell opening a six-pack of whoop-ass with a big, electrified shock baton. You’ll see the top floor of the Revelation Spire (the world’s tallest building), which houses the remnants of the Venus de Milo. You’ll get a taste of what a MultiReal-fueled soccer match would look like. You’ll see how the diss make coffee. You’ll get to meet the infamous Aunt Berilla and see what happens when the Surina/Natch MultiReal Fiefcorp crashes her estate. You’ll see a drudge get pushed in front of a moving tube train. You’ll see the Defense and Wellness Council kicking ass, taking names, and then putting all those names on 24-hour surveillance. You’ll see Horvil using MultiReal to perform acrobatics on a darkened stairwell. And oh so much more.

I’m still a novice at this novel-writing thing, so take this opinion with a grain of salt. But book 2 was about five times as hard to write as book 1.

I had a number of false starts. At some point, I intend to post all the first drafts of MultiReal’s chapter 1, just like I did with Infoquake. (Read the nine drafts of Infoquake’s chapter 1.) (Update 8/25/08 @ 1:30 PM: Here they are.) But we’re not just talking about differences in style and tone here. There were entire subplots considered, begun, and abandoned. There were a few times when I polished and polished that first chapter until it was perfect… only to decide that I needed to go in an entirely different direction. My wife and I even drove out to Harper’s Ferry so I could get a good look at the setting for one of those abandoned chapters. (Luckily, it wasn’t an entirely wasted trip; Harper’s Ferry does make a short appearance in the beginning of chapter 2.)

I’m hoping that Geosynchron, book 3 in the Jump 225 Trilogy, proves to be much easier to write. I’ve got a detailed outline and some individual scenes sketched out in my head. I’ve also got a very old first draft already written, though it’s so far out of date it will almost be no help. (To put things in perspective… when I wrote this first draft, Quell was an old man who liked to smoke hand-rolled cigarettes, Brone had died during the Shortest Initiation in book 1, and Natch still had a spunky girlfriend named Ferris. Then again, when I finished this draft, the only thing special about September 11 was that Bob Dylan’s long-awaited new album was expected to be released on that day.)

Excited? Can’t wait? Don’t worry, there’s still plenty of time to order a copy of Infoquake and read it through before MultiReal hits the shelves. Pyr has yet to announce their final schedule for the season, so I’m not going to pretend to give you an official word about scheduling — but it looks like we’re talking about Summer 2008.

And don’t worry, I’m planning all kinds of crunchy, wholesome promotional goodness surrounding the book. There’ll be free online material, con appearances, giveaway contests, podcasts and video blogs, readings, and more. So keep your RSS feed readers tuned to this here blog now, m’kay?