John Shirley and Daniel Marcus free talk in San Francisco, May 17
JOHN SHIRLEY "known for astonishingly consistent and rigorously horrifying work, addresses the terrible ease with which we modern Americans have learned to look away from pain and suffering... And while the matter of his stories is often shocking, his manner is calm, restrained, the prose attitude-free and precise, its characteristic sound a minor chord of sorrow and banked anger. His fiction, however, is only sometimes recognizably horror, as Shirley was also one of the primary cyberpunk writers, in company with William Gibson, Bruce Sterling and Rudy Rucker." His "lost cyberpunk novel" Black Glass, is due out in August from ESP books, with the urban fantasy novel Bleak History from Simon & Schuster to follow. John Shirley also wrote several suspense novels including Spider Moon and The Brigade, and won a Bram Stoker Award for his collection Black Butterflies. His best-known science fiction novels are City Come A-Walkin', the Eclipse trilogy, and A Splendid Chaos.Link (Thanks, Rina!)DANIEL MARCUS has published around twenty short stories in literary and genre venues, including Witness, Asimovs, Science Fiction, Realms of Fantasy, ZYZZYVA, and F&SF. Most of these stories will be collected in Binding Energy, appearing soon from Elastic Press. A finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, his short fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and placed in the Asimov's Readers' Poll Top 10. His nonfiction has appeared in Wired, the San Francisco Chronicle, on Boing-Boing, and he is a graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop. After a spectacularly unsuccessful career attempt as a saxophonist, Daniel earned a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from U.C. Berkeley. Currently a technology executive for a digital multimedia firm, Daniel lives in Berkeley, California, and he has authored more than twenty articles in the applied mathematics and computational physics literature, although the three are not mutually exclusive. Binding Energy is already garnering high praise, such as this from Mike Driscoll at The Fix: "If he deploys the mechanics of SF and fantasy, it is as a mean to explore worlds and mental landscapes defined by disconnectedness and isolation, by degradation and deceit, by love and its absence. This is not to say that these stories are filled with gloom and despair. Quite the contrary, most of them, despite their degraded physical or spiritual terrain, are marked by a sense of hope and possibility."
Lounge and cash bar open at 6:00 PM
7:00 PM readings
The Variety Preview Room
The Hobart Building, 1st Floor
582 Market St. @ Montgomery & 2nd, by Montgomery St. MUNI/BART
Entrance to the Hobart Bldg. is between Citibank and Quiznos
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It's too bad SFinSF doesn't offer RSS feeds for their content so people could subscribe to these notices... Someone should introduce them to this new-fangled blogging thing.
I haven't made it to a single event since the one with you, Cory, since I almost always hear about them *after* the event has happened.
I get the impression they'd be really happy to have someone volunteer to set up tech stuff for them.
All right. I'll have to consider that after I get out of term paper hell in the next two weeks. Maybe I'll help them get a real blog going if they want the aid.
Man, I wish that I could catch this. I just caught the episode of Profit that Shirley wrote.
Please email me at sffilmvariety@yahoo.com to subscribe to our bi-monthly SF in SF newsletter, for advance notice of SF in SF author events, and chec our site www.sfinsf.org. For instance, we have Carol Emshwiller and Pat Murphy reading on June 21.
The newsletter also lists all SF/F/H literary and related genre events in the larger San Francisco Bay Area.
We also have a free monthly SFFH film series. Join us June 11 for Jason & the Argonauts & Army of Darkness! A cash bar at events help us raise money for Variety Children's Charity of Northern California (www.varietync.org)
I do post the events online in a number of places, but we LOVE Boing Boing best :)
Rick Kleffel of The Agony Column also podcasts each of the SF in SF author events; links at his site and in our newsletter.
And - seriously - If you would like to contact me about any other tech stuff, please do at the above address! (We do have a new website launching in July/August as well.)
Rina Weisman
Al, Cory - Never fear, all is under control. Things will happen on the web site in due course.