Even though I am miffed with Hulu over their choice to remove themselves from Boxee, this is a rare chance for fans to ask Joss questions.

Have a burning question for the brains behind Buffy, Angel, Firefly, Dr. Horrible and Dollhouse? Now’s your chance to ask Joss Whedon for answers. See if you can get him to spill the beans about his latest heroine, Echo, and whether we’ll ever see Dr. Horrible on Broadway. Send your questions to askjoss@hulu.com by 9 a.m. PST on Wednesday, February 25 (Hulu).

Good luck getting your question to him.  I know I am going to come up with some goodies to ask the master of dark fiction.

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I am working on a series on the future of entertainment media: music, audiobooks, books, comics, movies, television series, and I am curious where you think everything is going.  Piracy, copyright, creative commons, user generated works, streaming, and online collaboration have changed the media landscape forever.

The old models for production, distribution, and monetizing entertainment media have been changed forever, and there is no clear path forward.  To make this series, I want to gather as many ideas as possible.  No one has the answer yet, but together, we can start moving in the right direction.

So what are you ideas, you can post them in the comments here, or email me your thoughts.  Is there someone you want us to try to get a comment from?  The best posts will be included in the series.  Let’s get the dialogue started!

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I am so fortunate to have met David through Facebook.  I really wish I had more time to read, his book, The Mirrored Heavens has cast a spell over me, and I sneak a moment to read a section every free moment I can.  As soon as I finish, I will post a review.  Until then, meet David.

Why did you start writing?

For that I have (at least) five answers. I hate to privilege one above the other, so let’s just chalk this one up as “overdetermined.”

Answer #1: I was working in management consulting, I’d turned thirty, I was bored shitless with the corporate world, and I could feel time burning down on me like a #$# candle.

Answer #2: I’d done some work on the side with friends in Vancouver, BC in the video game industry, and through a strange fluke got co-writing credits for Relic Entertainment’s Homeworld. But the next day I was back at the corporate world, hating it more than ever, and wondering why I was living in a universe where I had friends who drew spaceships for a living while I was stuck staring at profit-loss spreadsheets.

Answer #3: I suddenly had one of those moments like in Raiders of the Lost Ark where Indy realizes all the Nazis are digging in the wrong place: i.e., I got a glimpse of an area of SF that no one was tapping into (near-future space weaponization across the Earth-Moon system), and I wondered what a novel in such a setting would look like.

Answer #4: I became obsessed with the notion of what cyberpunk would be like if the state DIDN’T wither away.

Answer #5: I had no idea what I was getting myself into.

Where do you get your ideas?

I read a ton of history, and that’s where a lot of my ideas come from.  What’s happened in the past offers plenty of rich source material, especially because you can mine all sorts of obscure events and everyone thinks you’re being totally original.  : )

Also worth mentioning is the extent to which I study the U.S. military, and their planning for future war.  The military’s under no illusions that the center of gravity of warfare is shifting into space, and they’ve got a lot of stuff in the public domain tracing the implications.  I tried to map that out a hundred years, and ask what would space war be like if it was realistic, and obeyed the laws of orbital dynamics, and didn’t just feature spaceships doing physically-impossible dogfights.  (don’t get me wrong, I love that kind of thing, but it’s not what I write.)

What was the process of writing The Mirrored Heaven like?

At first it was like running around in the woods with a flashlight. You think there’s something out there, but you don’t know what, and you start to think you’re going crazy. Eventually I had hundreds of pages of incoherent writing, and at some point during that process I started to realize how badly and totally all of it sucked. It was four years before I managed to find the voice/style I’d been searching for, and about that long before the plot really started to come together. (having an eighty-hour-a-week dayjob from hell might have lengthened the process, but OTOH maybe it made me more focused). But in the last few years, things started to really move, and by 2006 I felt like one of those rock bands that’s gotten really tight, and might just get lucky enough to land a record deal. Which I eventually did . . .but sometimes I miss those days when I circled round the far side of Mars and didn’t even know what I was staring at . . .

What was the process like to find a publisher?

About as hard as people tell you it is. Agents only want to look at veteran writers, and publishers only want writers with agents. As a general rule, unless you know somebody at a publisher, you have to start with the agents, but the problem is that the query-letter process is a #$# meatgrinder—or at least, one that I never mastered. In my opinion, the key is to somehow meet the agents directly; I met mine (Jenny Rappaport) at WorldCon (LA, 2006) . . . though anyone who knows anything about this business knows that WorldCon is the LAST place to meet an agent. But sometimes not knowing the rules is a big help.

What is it like working with a publisher?

You hear all these horror stories in the blogosphere, but I gotta say, working with Bantam Spectra has been great. Largely that’s because of Juliet Ulman, my editor; she made the book heaps better than it was when she bought it, and taught me a great deal across the editing process. Plus I love the cover the artist (Paul Youll) did . . .eighty stories above the burning Amazonian delta city of Belem-Macapa . . .

What has the post publication experience been?

On one level, awesome. To have characters who dwelt for years within my head out in the world being experienced by readers is absolutely #$# amazing.

But on another level, it’s humbling. At the risk of revisiting that rock band analogy, most bands that make a debut album never make another. It’s the same with novels; this is very much an “up or out” business: you have to break through to that next level, or you won’t survive. I’m fortunate in that I signed a three-book deal with Bantam Spectra, which gives me more momentum that I might have had otherwise. Above all else, the thing to remember about post publication experience is that you’ve got the second book to worry about, and that had better be ten times more insane than the first.

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According to the LA Times

Ackerman, a writer, editor and literary agent who has been credited with coining the term “sci-fi” in the 1950s, died Thursday of heart failure at his home in Los Angeles, said John Sasser, a friend who is making a documentary on Ackerman.

Ackerman was 92 when he passed away and an inspiration to many. One of the ways he influenced our generation and those that came before us, was his position as editor of Famous Monsters of Filmland. Though of his more famous achievements he was the writer/creator of the characters Vampirella and Jeanie of Questar.

He was a huge fan of all things fantasy, horror, and sci-fi which as stated in his LA Times Obituary, he was

a man who actually had known Lugosi and Karloff and whose priceless collection of science-fiction, horror and fantasy artifacts ran to some 300,000 items.

Which could possibly be the largest in the world, if not close.

Watch Forrest J Ackerman brief history of early Sci-Fi video here

His death is a great loss to all of fandom across the greater Speculative Fiction genre.

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Recently, while doing research for a horror book discussion, I found an article on Wikipedia that talked about the first vampire fiction. According to Wikipedia, “The literary vampire first appeared in eighteenth century poetry, before becoming one of the stock figures of gothic fiction with the publication of John William Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819), which was inspired by the life and legend of Lord Byron.”

In an attempt to find more about it, I ran across a website that had The Vampyre in text format. I was so excited, I almost injured myself trying to click fast enough on the link! Let me tell you about this awesome find.

If you can get past the many typos that this free online text has, it is worth the read for any vampire fan. At times I did have to read a sentence twice because of the old English language and the run on sentences. It has almost no dialogue, which for some can be a trial. However, to be able to read a piece of work that has inspired so many awesome vampire books is amazing. It’s almost like watching an old silent movie. There’s something about the art of it that allows you to soak up ambience you don’t always get in modern fast-paced tales.

The Vampyre, though original in its day, is predictable. Lord Ruthven, the vampyre, is a gambler, womanizer, and known throughout the ton for “hurling young ladies from the pinnacle of unsullied virtue, down to the lowest abyss of infamy and degradation”. Got to love that language. There is an innocent gentleman, Mr. Aubrey, who travels with Lord Ruthven. When Aubrey finds out about his friend’s “licentious habits that are dangerous to society” he distances himself and attempts to go on with his life. Aubrey soon learns that you can’t just walk away with out injury as the vampyre maliciously attempts to ruin all that is good in his world on the false pretense of being his closest and dearest friend.

My favorite section of this tale is when a woman tells of vampires and what they are known to do.

…often as she told him the tale of the living vampyre, who had passed years amidst his friends, and dearest ties, forced every year, by feeding upon the life of a lovely female to prolong his existence for the ensuing months, his blood would run cold, but lathe cited to him the names of old men, who had at last detected one living among themselves, after several of their near relatives and children had been found marked with the stamp of the fiend’s appetite…

You can enjoy this tale yourself, by going to: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/6087

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OMG, my jaw dropped.

Michael Crichton, the million-selling author who made scientific research terrifying and irresistible in such thrillers as “Jurassic Park,” “Timeline” and “The Andromeda Strain,” has died of cancer, his family said (AP).

This is a shock.  I was just talking about his books this weekend.  His imagination will be missed by his fans, and he will be missed by his family and friends.

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**Possible Spoilers**

The Plague series by Jeff Carlson is about a nanotech plague that erupts in California and soon takes over the world. Supposedly a cure for cancer, this plague begins to eat away at anything under roughly ten thousand feet. People are forced up into the mountains for fear of dying from the completely debilitating flesh-eating nano. Soon, the global population is hiding on various heights seemingly floating above the invisible sea of computer plague. These books are so real that you begin to find yourself asking, “What if this happened tomorrow?” According to author, Jeff Carlson, it could. What makes him the authority on the realness of the computer plague? He’s been talking to scientists working on similar projects as we speak.

The trilogy has been called ingenious, thrilling, and cutting edge. Here are my thoughts on each of the books:

Plague Year

The first few pages of Plague Year confused me because I am not used to reading a book that jumps so quickly into action. I thought perhaps it would be too “fast-pace thriller” for me to finish. However, Jeff’s ability to make you feel emotion about the characters when you hardly know any back-story on them really amazed me. He did get into their back stories as the novel progressed. There were exciting surprises later on as far as who did what before the plague. These characters are real and once you start reading, you begin to feel like they are your buddies out on that hill. It’s as if you are standing in the huddled masses with them.

This book can scare the crap out of you. Living in Nor Cal, the news reports about what cities the plague takes over as it eats its way across the country seemed too real. Jeff makes you feel like you are watching the news reports on TV. Maybe you’ll be the one making a call to your mom in the hotzone. Maybe you’ll be the one gathering supplies and heading for the hills.

While I was reading Plague Year, I found myself thinking about how long it would take me to pack up my family and flee. My mind would start charting ways to get to Tahoe if the roads were blocked. Then I’d remember it wasn’t really happening and calm down.

As far as all the scientist and military stuff is concerned, I am not an expert. Jeff explained well enough for me to understand what the nano does without making me bored or feel inadequate.

One portion of the book I thought he did particularly well was where one of the characters is in a wheelchair and unable to express himself. The anger and desperation Jeff creates is quite powerful.

While reading the Plague series, you might find yourself taking a few more showers than usual as his descriptions of grime, bugs, sores etc… are excellently detailed.

When I read the first book I thought the end of the book portion where they finally go into a city could have been longer. I felt like I missed out on what they actually did while hiding. Good news! He goes into that more in the sequel.

Overall I was surprised how much this book pulled me in and I would recommend it to anyone wanting to read something no one’s ever done before.

Plague War

I was surprised to find that although this sequel was in the same style as the first, it had a different sort of tone. The relationship between the two main characters Ruth and Cam is infectious. They each have their issues and it’s interesting to see how they interact with each other. The sexual tension that Plague War delivers is amazing considering all the characters are grimy, nano-bitten, unwashed, scrappers who will do anything to survive.

This book causes you to feel the desperation of a world that is in constant threat of annihilation. However, the characters have the hope to survive and the power of the human spirit to carry on, no matter what the obstacle.

Some of the untouched mountain people infuse this story with a newness, that by this time you would expect not to exist. The contrast of the beaten down warriors against these innocent, fresh-snow-like individuals is really an excellent contrast in a book that is about fighting for life.

There is a lot of war talk in this book. Military actions, governments colliding, plots foiled, plans carried out. Since I am not a fan of military stories, I was slightly distracted by this. However, the human relationships of the people in those uniforms carried me through those sections of the book. If you are a military enthusiast, I think you will be pleasantly surprised by how detailed this book is.

I was happy to see the reappearance of some of the characters from book one that I did not expect. Hernandez was a pleasant returnee. His point of view was intriguing because of his lack of control over the situation that was happening to him. I felt his struggle between what he knew was right and how he was going to survive.

Ulinov, who I disliked the most after book one, was one of the most interesting characters to read about because we get to see his allegiance to his country. It may not be a very popular thing to say, but I think I was actually on his side when the bomb hit.

With the set up of possible resolution in book 2, I am expecting great things from book three, Mind Plague, which comes out Summer 2009.

To find out more about Jeff Carlson, visit his site at: http://www.jverse.com and listen to my podcast interview on the Project Shadow Informant podcast:

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Weird Tales magazine is giving away free copies of their July/August issue for free!

Download it here.

Need a reason to get it?  Check out the table of contents:

Fiction

ALL IN | Peter Atwood

• Now this is truly organized gambling.

HOW I GOT HERE | Ramsey Shehadeh

• Between Heaven and Hell lie the streets of D.C.

BELAIR PLAZA | Adam Corbin Fusco

• There is no such thing as a cursed shopping center.

AN INVITATION VIA EMAIL | Mike Allen

• Getting tenure must be a real pain in the ass.

MAINEVERMONTNEWHAMPSHIREMASS| Nick Mamatas

• And then the horror convention got a little epic.

THE STONE-HEARTED QUEEN | Kelly Barnhill

• She shared her father’s magic — but enough of it?

GANARANOK | Rory Steves

• A Shakesperean love story, plus antennae.

EVOLUTION | Karen Heuler

• Can’t wait to grow up and escape Mom’s claws.

RIGHT YOU ARE IF YOU SAY YOU ARE| Norman Spinrad

• The princess was hot. Hotter than the dragonfire

Features

Mike Mignola: Hellboy’s Dad\

• The creator of Hellboy chats with Elizabeth Genco about Dracula, Lovecraft, and making weird comics.

Summer Reading Weirducopia

• An array of bizarre new books — plus an exclusive excerpt from the hot new steam-fantasy novel The Court of the Air!

Departments

• THE EYRIE | evolutions, transformations, metamorphoses
• WEIRDISM | music of the dark, terror of the night
• THE LIBRARY & BAZAAR | weird books and fantastical masks
• HARVEY PELICAN & CO. | special offers from the esoterica king
• LOST IN LOVECRAFT | a literary journey with Kenneth Hite
• THE CRYPTIC | fantastic commentary by Darrell Schweitzer
• FEEDBACK | what you thought of “The 85 Weirdest Storytellers”

Download it here.

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With the conversation and buzz building up over who will be in the next Batman Movie I thought we should take a moment to point out what should be the obvious.  The DC Comics Encyclopedia is a must have for any writer of DC comics movie.

This book is a wonderful reference full of heroes and villains from the DC Universe.  For each character they give at basic bio sheet, what comics they appear in and a couple of paragraphs with some basic information.  They also cover the different organizations like The Justice League and The Justice Society.  As a fan I love this book and use it often as a quick reference sometimes to refresh my memory and with the more obscure characters like Bat-Mite a good starting source of information.

If only they would have used this when writing Batman Begins they would have at least got some of the basic setting and character facts correct.   Is that too much to ask?

The DC Comics Encyclopedia

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I have been chasing an interesting story around the net. Hillel Italie reports for the AP that “Brief Books are in Style.”

In the decade since James Atlas revived the form with his “Penguin Lives” series, at least 10 publishers have started their own lines of short, nonfiction books, on subjects ranging from scientists to presidents to mythology. Although the advances are low — and sales often to match — short books have attracted such best sellers and prize winners as novelists Jane Smiley and Larry McMurtry, essayists Christopher Hitchens and Bill Bryson, and historians Robert Dallek and Sean Wilentz (Boston.com).

The majority of the article is various authors bemoaning the restrictions of the brief format. I, on the other hand, have a very different point of view.

As a reader, I simple don’t have the time to sit down for 20-30 hours and enjoy a brilliantly elaborate tale of intrigue and daring do. If it weren’t for Audible, Podiobooks, and Narrator (software for the Mac that turns text into an audiobook/play), I would not have much time to read at all.

I hear it all the time from friends and family as well. Gas prices are going up, few and few movies are coming out that we want to go see, and our obligations are multiplying, nibbling away at what little free time we had in the first place. This is a problem.

As a writer, I am happy and scared by this trend to smaller books. I love serials, and pulp era fiction, and this push to smaller books lets me write more like my heroes. It is also a strong pressure on me.

I have been working on a fix up of my book Liquid Sky so that it will be more serial friendly. It will be released as four books, one for each part, and a collected volume, and Shine Like Thunder is a short book too.

I like the format. It is possible to do more with less. My only real fear is that if our free time keeps eroding, then we will have no recreation time at all.

For now, I have to say three cheers for the short form book! Maybe, just maybe, we will see a new golden age of fiction.

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