The Book is DONE

So…

I wrote a book!

The first draft of Cosplay: A History, or whatever we’re going to call it, is now complete. And by complete, it’s like a house with walls, a roof that’s leaking, and that’s in dire need of some more furniture, plumbing, and a couple of coats of paint.

But, that first draft is done, and it came in quite a bit longer than I thought it would be. If all goes well, it’ll get longer yet: I have a ton of interviews with a ton of cool people, and there’s a lot more to include before this is done. Like any history project I’ve ever worked on, there’s always something cool to add, and at some point, it’ll be done-done.

The book is now turned in, and it’ll go through the whole editorial process, notes, comments, and beta readers, then publishing. I honestly have no idea when it’ll work its way through that system. Hopefully, you’ll be able to get your hands on a copy in the near future.

Now, I’m going to go play Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, which has been my self-imposed reward for finishing.

I'm writing a book about the history of cosplay!

Some personal news that I can now announce: I’m writing a book about the history of cosplay!

I’ve been calling the project Cosplay: A History, (something that might change), and it should be out by Summer 2021. Syfy has the details here.

But as fascinating as the current state of cosplay is, Liptak is also interested in exploring where it came from by researching the history of halloween costumes, Hollywood designers, and old costume masquerades from the earliest conventions. Cosplay: A History is a deep-dive examination into the dynamic story of cosplay and how it has grown to become a world-wide phenomenon.

Seth Fishman sold the book to Joe Monti at Saga Press, which I’m extremely excited about. Saga has published some really great books in the last couple of years (Seriously, I’m sharing the same space with people like Kameron Hurley, Rebecca Roanhorse, Ken Liu, Elizabeth Bear, Theodora Goss, and more — to say that I’m feeling imposter syndrome is an understatement.)

I’ve spoken with Joe a bunch of times over the years, and the topic of cosplay came up more than once. Those conversations dovetailed with a growing interest in Cosplay. I’ve dressed up in armor with the 501st Legion for more than a decade now, but I’ve begun thinking and writing about how people come together in larger communities over a shared interest in suiting up as their favorite heroes. I’ve written about costuming for outlets like io9 and The Verge, spoken about it on Vermont Public Radio and at Norwich University. In particular, I’ve gotten really interested in how the movement formed, and how it’s changed over time as new franchises pop up and as makers have begun to use new techniques to make costumes.

This book will be an attempt to expand on some of the writing that i’ve done over the years, looking the roots of cosplay and how costuming became this big, global phenomenon, how internet culture has helped shape it, and what it means for the future of entertainment. It’ll include interviews with folks about their involvement in the space, along with photographs of people I chat with along the way.

Obviously, there’ll be some nerding out about the 501st Legion, but also things like 3D printing, the rise of Comic-Con, and historical reenacting. I’m also hoping to talk about the wide range of costumes that are out there, from the marquee superheroes to the obscure characters that show up in the background of the Mos Eisley Cantina.

What I’m hoping to ultimately cover in this project is the relationship that people have with stories, and how costuming brings them closer to the characters and worlds they love, and how it allows them to interact with the text in unique ways.

I’ll be working on the book this summer and fall, and I’ll likely have a bunch of updates and anecdotes as I do so. The best way to stay up to date will be to sign up for my newsletter, but I’ll probably be posting up pictures to Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter while I’m at conventions or generally researching it. I’d also like to hear from cosplayers from all eras — I’ll be setting up a way to get in touch about that.

Interviewed by File 770 about Better Worlds

Mike Glyer at File 770 recently interviewed me about the online anthology that I’ve been working on, Better Worlds. Mike asked some good questions about the balance between science and technology, the larger impact of the project, and some advice for aspiring writers.

MG: What’s your advice for aspiring science fiction authors?

ANDREW LIPTAK: There’s a lot of advice out there that’s good — read a lot, write a lot, and read what you’ve written out loud, and so forth.

Something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is how incredibly valuable it is to break out of your shell / community / circle of writers / group to discover new ideas and viewpoints. I recently moderated a panel on the implications of artificial intelligence at the United States Military Academy at West Point, and I came out of that three-day experience with a notepad full of ideas for potential stories, based on what I’d seen and heard.

In other, related Better Worlds news, we’ve released a couple of other stories since I first updated about the project back in January. We’ve got ‘Online Reunion’ by Leigh Alexander, ‘A Model Dog’ by John Scalzi, ‘Monsters Come Howling in Their Season’ by Cadwell Turnbull, ‘St. Juju‘ by Rivers Solomon, ‘The Burn’ by Peter Tieryas, ‘A Sun Will Always Sing’ by Karin Lowachee, and ‘Skin City’ by Kelly Robson. We’ve got three more stories coming up — ‘Move The World’ by Carla Speed McNeil (coming Friday), ‘Overlay’ by Elizabeth Bonesteel (coming Monday), and ‘Machine of Loving Grace’ by Katherine Cross (coming Wednesday).

The project has been a bear, and it’s great to finally see the stories up online. Of the entire group, I think my favorite stories are the ones by ‘Monsters Come Howling in Their Season’, ‘A Sun Will Always Sing’, and ‘A Theory of Flight’, but that’s not to say that I don’t really like everything else on this table of contents. The art is superb — all credit there goes to William Joel, our Art Director for the project, and I’ve really enjoyed the videos — especially ‘A Theory of Flight’ and ‘A Sun Will Always Sing.’ The video for ‘Overlay’ is also quite good — you’ll see that next week.

I’m also a big fan of the audio adaptations, which feature full casts and sound effects, which really puts them a leg up and above other fiction podcasts that I’ve heard. I’m biased, of course, but the general feedback that I’ve seen in online comments on the videos and on Twitter / Facebook have been almost uniformly positive.

Front Porch Forum feature

I just published a big feature on The Verge: “How a Vermont became a model for online communities.” It’s a piece that’s been in the works for more than a year now, about a social network here in Vermont called Front Porch Forum.

The piece started back in the fall of 2017 — I made an offhand comment about it during a story meeting, which peaked our Editor in Chief, Nilay Patel’s interest. FPF is a network of forums that exists here in Vermont — each town gets a forum (for the most part), where they can post messages to. Most people use it for things like asking for recommendations (I’ve gotten reliable names for plumbers and carpenters through it), for highlighting lost pets, or in more extreme instances, helping with disaster recovery, as what happened in 2011 when Irene devastated the state. It was particularly helpful in my hometown of Moretown.

I began work on the article, and our staff photographer, Amelia Krales came by to take pictures of various locations in Vermont — Moretown, Westford, and Burlington. Her pictures are fantastic, and worth clicking on the story in and of themselves.

Between my other responsibilities at work, this was a slow-burning piece. That worked a bit in our favor, because last year was when social media had a pretty bad year — Facebook was engulfed in a bunch of scandals, while Twitter had its own issues. What makes FPF stand out, I think, is that it’s pushing social connections down to a local level, rather than a global one — and, they police their content, and are pretty proactive about booting people who are being abusive.

It’s a complete coincidence that it came out today, just after Cadwell Turnbull’s short story, Monsters Come Howling in Their Season, went up on the site, which deals very much with some similar (fictional) issues.

A lot of people helped with this: Josh Dzierza and Casey Newton edited, our features editor Kevin Nguyen took a pass. Adia Watts copyedited all 4000+ words, and Amelia took the fantastic pictures. I’m really happy with how it turned out, and I think it’s one of the better things I’ve written for the site.

Wordplay #5: A short story about magic in the real(ish) world

Wordplay #5 is out to subscribers! And unlike the first four, this one is only available to people who subscribe, because it was a little different: a short story. If people are interested and sign up this week, I do have the option to send it out again to newcomers.

An idea that I’ve been turning around in my head recently is things in our real world that are like magic, and I decided to play that out — an idea coalesced on a recent trip, and it seemed like a good way to talk about this, rather than just doing a straight-up think piece. Plus, I haven’t actually written — let alone finished — a short story in a long time. I don’t know if / when that’ll appear anywhere else, but I had fun writing it.

I might do that again at some point down the road. You can sign up and read past public issues here.

First newsletter up

As promised, I’ve started up a newsletter — my attempt to pull away a bit from social media. I’m calling it Wordplay, and the focus will be a smattering of my interests, loosely around the topic of storytelling, science fiction, and writing.

I talk about lunar novels, Star Wars, science fiction history, and what I’m currently reading, and you can read the first installment here. If you like what you read, you can sign up here. I’m thinking that the next one will go out in about two weeks.

I'm starting up a newsletter

Over the last couple of years, I’ve corresponded with two authors, Eliot Peper and Peter Tieryas, and at this year’s New York Comic Con, we ended up meeting up for dinner. It was great to see both of them in person for the first time, and we spoke about a wide range of things, from science fiction to the internet, to online communities.

One of the things that came up was a mailing list that Eliot maintains. You should subscribe to it: each month, he sends out a bunch of book recommendations “that explore the intersection of technology and culture.” We got to talking about some of the problems with social media, and how online newsletters seemed to be making a comeback in recent years.

There’s been a bunch of newsletters that I’ve started following. I’ve been reading Hot Pod by Nick Quah, a podcast industry newsletter. My colleague Casey Newton runs a daily column called The Interface over on The Verge, which is all about social media and democracy, which is pretty interesting, and Liz Lopatto runs a weekly one called This Week in Elon, all about Elon Musk, which is entertaining. Eliot touted the newsletter format as something a bit more personal for readers: not quite as sporadic as a Twitter feed, but not as open as a blog post.

Given my quibbles with social media, it feels like a good place to jot down ideas. My rough plan is to write about a couple of my general beats — science fiction, storytelling, and the future of reading in general, probably along the lines of yesterday’s post about Frank Herbert’s longevity, along with some random links to other stories / posts / articles that I’ve liked. I haven’t hammered out details just yet, but I figure it’ll be roughly monthly, with the occasional extra, or maybe a short story if I get my act together and actually stick to writing fiction on a regular basis. My goal is that it’ll be thoughtful, and a step back from the overt self-promotion that my Facebook and Twitter pages feel like sometimes.

Anyway, it’ll be an experiment. If you’re willing to play along, sign up here.

Citizens & Soldiers: The First 200 Years of Norwich University

In my final years at Norwich University, I took a course about the school’s history, one of the high-level seminars that you take in the field. I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect (other than that it might be kind of boring), but I liked the instructor, and it turned out to be a really fascinating field of study. It also proved to be one of those courses that charts the direction of your interests and career. My final project was a study of the Norwich students who fought at Normandy during World War II, and it came with a neat opportunity: a trip to the battlefield along with some high-level alumni and donors. I was the youngest by decades, but got to talk extensively about the students whose footsteps we were literally following, both at school and on the battlefield.

Over the years since, I’ve done quite a bit of study in the topic: I researched Norwich students who fought at the Battle of the Bulge and during World War I, as well as a smattering of articles. The latest is now available in a new book, Citizens & Soldiers: The First 200 Years of Norwich. The school is coming up on its bicentennial next year, and to commemorate it, the school commissioned bestselling author Alex Kershaw (you know, the guy who wrote The Bedford Boys, The Few, The Longest Winter, The Liberator, and others) to write it. He’s on the level of Stephen Ambrose when it comes to WWII histories.

The book is a narrative and independent overview of Norwich’s history, and to flesh it out in places, the school brought in some freelancers to contribute some pieces. I got to write about the 2nd Armored Division, which I’d covered in some of my work.

The book isn’t widely for sale just yet: if you’re in Vermont, you can stop by the school to pick up a copy (either a $1000 Commemorative Edition, or an $85 edition), but it’ll apparently hit their online store at some point in the near future, and they spoke a bit about plans for an eBook or paperback edition for students at some point in the future.

I haven’t read this yet — it’s a big book — but I’ve spoke with Alex about his work on it, and heard him speak about it: an epic story of a school that had a real footprint in the history of our nation, and even if you’re not an alum, it should make for a really interesting read. I’m happy to have a small part in it.

Engaging the Future: The Art of Future Warfare

Earlier this week, I attended a conference put on by the Army's Training and Doctrine Command's Mad Scientist Initiative, a program designed to explore "the future through collaborative partnerships and continuous dialogue with academia, industry and government." The conference was titled "Learning in 2050," and was designed to examine how the Army would train soldiers in the deep future (which they define as the future where you can't realistically predict politics / technology) I was invited in the capacity of a science fiction writer, to give my thoughts on how science fiction might fit into the equation. That's a difficult question, because science fiction really isn't good at answering that question, but it does allow people to think about the future. Here's the talk that I gave: 

When I graduated from Norwich University with my Masters’ in Military History a couple of years ago, I began thinking a bit more deeply about how the real-world military intersected with another passion of mine, science fiction. The genre has a grand tradition of depicting the armed forces over the course of its history, something I’ve contributed to with stories of my own, as well as an anthology that I edited.

Stories about future wars are well-suited for science fiction: the confluence of major technological advancement and investment in the years that followed World War II brought about stories of atomic weapons, spaceborne warships, and soldiers kitted out in advanced suits of armor, predictions of what we might go to war with in future conflicts.

But science fiction isn’t about predicting the future in a meaningful way. It’s true: authors like Jules Verne, Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick, and others have anticipated or even inspired technological advances: we certainly have submarines, satellites and the internet, but the future is more than just the technology that we deploy into the real world. Rather, science fiction is a framework and mindset with which we engage the future, thinking about the present moment and how our actions today will play out tomorrow.

“Science fiction is a framework and mindset with which we engage the future
”

Science fiction’s efforts to try and imagine and interpret the military world stretch to the earlier days of the genre. In 1871, a novella called The Battle of Dorking appeared in Blackwoods Magazine, set fifty years from its publication — 1921 — of a soldier recounting a battle to his grandchildren. England is invaded by a technologically superior enemy, and falls. It was a warning written by British Army general George Chesney, who had fought in India and was sent home due to injuries, and worried deficiencies he saw in the country’s armed forces at the time. While it wasn’t the first such “future war” story published, it was enormously popular, and would help to prefigure other stories of warfare that would come.

One such follow up story is far more recognizable: H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, a dazzling story of invasion as aliens from Mars land on Earth with the intent of occupation, only to fall prey to microbes that they don’t have immunity to. Note: when you decide invade a planet, make sure you invest in biological containment protocols.

War of the Worlds and The Battle of Dorking gave rise to numerous successors: Starship Troopers, The Forever War, Ender’s Game, Red Storm Rising, Ghost Fleet, and many others. But if there’s anything that links these stories together, it’s that they haven’t realistically predicted the types of wars that we’ll actually face on the battlefield. We haven’t established bases on the moon or Mars. While there are early efforts at creating them, soldiers don’t go into the field clad in powered armor, and predictions of imminent hot wars between major world powers haven’t come to pass, although some stories could come close. But as no plan survives first contact with the enemy, no science fiction story survives first contact with the future.

“But as no plan survives first contact with the enemy, no science fiction story survives first contact with the future.
”

Military science fiction is frequently set in the future, and it’s exciting! You get laser guns, giant robots, epic space battles, power armor, and more when you visit your bookstore or movie theater. But it’s a poor predictive tool. Science fiction promised us flying cars and bases on the moon, but we got Facebook and Twitter instead. Given the behavior of people on Facebook and Twitter, I think it’s probably a good thing that we haven’t been handed the keys to those jetpacks and flying cars.

So, if science fiction isn’t a good or accurate predictor of the future, what good is it, and how can it be harnessed as a tool in the arsenal of teaching soldiers how to anticipate the future?

This is something that I think about quite a bit. I’ve written stories of my own, and I’ve read and edited military sf stories, with the aim of using the genre to explore the world around us. Science fiction, in many ways, is an exercise in examination of the present world around us and how we got here. I might write about armored mechs and power armor-clad soldiers, but these stories simply wouldn’t make sense if they aren’t firmly rooted in the concerns of today. A couple of years ago, I published a short story called Fragmented. Its origins stem from an NPR article that I heard on the radio about how the army decontaminated tanks coming back from Iraq. It was an involved process, and it got me thinking: what would happen to a soldier who lived in their armor on a battlefield? It stood to reason that it would be an integral part of their survival, and that having that armor stripped away when they were done with their tour could be a traumatic experience, or might force them to face existence without it, the one constant thing that kept them alive through their trials.

When it came to editing War Stories, my co-editor and I wanted to get away from what we saw as jingoistic stories of heroic soldiers killing bug-eyed aliens. Instead, we put out a call for stories where the impact of warfare was central to the characters, whether they were soldiers or civilians. These stories don’t exist in a vacuum, and I hope that they’ve helped people understand that as obsessed with technology as military science fiction is, it isn’t the most important part of the story: it’s the characters and how they cope with the changes around them.

This is where I feel science fiction can be an important resource for any effort that looks at what we face in the years ahead. We don’t know what the future will hold — after all, science fiction has a terrible track record when it comes to predicting the future. But what it does do is allow people to make a critical first step towards defining the question: “what’s next?” It allows us to interrogate the present and think and grapple with the world that we’ll soon find ourselves living in. At its worst, it can be escapist fantasy of the thrill of action that has no lasting impact aside from a nice mental detour. At its most durable, it’s a close examination of where we are today, how today will morph into tomorrow, and influences the works that come after it.  

“Science Fiction enables people to make a critical first step towards defining the question: “what’s next?”
”

How do we use the genre to prepare soldiers for the conflicts of that they’ll face in the decades ahead? If we think about the world that we’ll inhabit by 2050, think about the gulf in time between 2018 and 1986: 32 years ago. Cell phones were in their infancy. With those primitive phones in mind, think about how much more computing power we now carry with us, and the types of things that we can do. Just in the last couple of days, I navigated over 500 miles, using real-time directions and incident reports, I hailed a stranger in a car, caught some creatures with a geolocation-based game, and looked up a restaurant on a map all from my phone. The best science fiction stories don’t just imagine how technology functions, but how it’s used. Look at how people have abused app-based technologies or platforms like YouTube, Twitter or Facebook, either through routine mass-harassment from afar to soliciting like-minded friends for terrorist activities. Look at how the proliferation of cameras on these devices and how that correlates with the rise in coverage of police brutality, how these networks can bring marginalized communities together, or how the crowd can amass incredible amounts of data — all from their phones. This was the stuff of science fiction just decades ago.

We are living in a science fictional age. Think about some piece of technology that you might use in the field, and try to imagine how that technology might change in the same amount of time. When the cell phone was invented in 1973, I don’t think its inventors could have fathomed the 2008 Mumbai attacks, which were coordinated through the use of mobile phones, VOIP calling, and Google Earth. I recently wrote about a fitness app’s heat map that accidentally revealed the locations of military bases in the Middle East, data that foreign intelligence agents would have died to get their hands on. I think we’re all in agreement that technology will continue to advance at a rapid pace, and that it will continue to evolve, and will be used in any number of incredible ways. The future will be weirder than we can imagine.

Think about the technologies that are coming down the pipeline: autonomous vehicles, exoskeletons, new types of information at our fingertips. Science fiction has put these types of technology to use already, and it’s useful to play with the possibilities. In Linda Nagata’s The Red, soldiers use exoskeletons and brain interfaces to enhance their abilities on the battlefield. In Adam Robert’s New Model Army, he imagines crowdsourced warfare, where armies spring up instantly. We can write about these coming changes in clear, analytical reports or white papers. But as Peter Singer told me these are like paper Ambien. It’s stories about characters that excite us, and pull us into the world to imagine how we’ll react and what happens next. Stories are good at figuring out where technology breaks down because of how it’s used by people. I can easily imagine a story in which the first casualty of a future war isn’t from enemy combatants, but a bored soldier goofing off with a set of powered armor. I can imagine an enemy combatant stymying a new weapons system with a can of spray paint. There will be battlefields in new environments: dense urban combat in super cities, in regions wrecked by climate change, or in low earth orbit. Science fiction can allow us to understand problems — big and small —in ways we can easily grasp and comprehend, how to overcome them and fully understand the ramifications of introducing a new piece of expensive tech into the field.

But these stories are only as good as the problems and worlds that authors can imagine, and it’s important to remember not only that the futures imagined by science fiction authors aren’t always great predictors of the future, but that they can carry our own biases and weak points. When developing a body of work, it’s important to bring in a wide spectrum of viewpoints, to seek out and invite authors and thinkers who look and think differently from yourself. The best stories draw on all of the real world’s complexities and nuances to present a story and world that draws out those complex and nuanced problems and solutions.

We learn from these challenges, and with each new story, we practice how to approach those roadblocks and how to get comfortable with a rapidly changing environment.

Changes in technology, climate, and politics are the building blocks, but it’s how people and future soldiers inhabit those worlds that makes for good stories. How will soldiers of the future deal with the presence of robots on the battlefield? What decisions will they make to survive? What motivates them — and their adversaries to act? This is where science fiction storytelling has an added advantage: the emphasis on realism begets a fictional construct much like our own, where its characters are constrained by their surroundings. By framing these imaginary futures in a realistic framework for which we can create moral dilemma that force characters to act, we can use fiction to put ourselves in the place of the characters, ask how we would make the decisions that they need to make, and learn from their mistakes. Stories aren’t about an advanced piece of technology; they’re about how the characters exist in whatever futures we’ve imagined for them.

This is where storytelling can be a powerful tool. Storytelling sparks curiosity, and gets us interested defining an unknown future. I’m very fond of a quote from Secretary of Defense James Mattis, that he’s “never been caught flat-footed by any situation, never at a loss for how any problem has been addressed (successfully or unsuccessfully) before,” because of the books and stories he’s read. When done right, fiction goes beyond mere entertainment: it’s a way to generate discussion about those conflicts that drive good stories. Ideally, your future soldiers won’t be involved in something that makes for a good science fiction story (just remember, biological containment protocols in first contact scenarios).

Ultimately, the future is uncertain, and uncertainty is scary. Engaging with the future through fiction, where the stakes are low, allows us to learn and practice those first steps that we take into tomorrow and prepare us for the world that we’ll soon inhabit.

Alongside any plans for the future, there should be a strong body of artistic work to complement it, to educate and inspire the people who will fight for us. We’ve discussed many plans and theories for what to do next at this conference, and I’d like to challenge you to help take this first step: pick up a new book and carve out time to read it. Do it over and over. Pick up a pen or open a word document, and imagine a future you want to see. Then do it again. And again.

Presentation: Army TRADOC's Mad Scientist conference: Learning in 2050

Next week, I'll be in Washington D.C. to present at the US Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) Mad Scientist Initiative Conference, Learning in 2050. TRADOC is the command that oversees the training of the entire army, operating a dozens of schools and facilities. One of their initiatives is Mad Scientist, which looks to explore the future through "collaborative partnerships and continuous dialogue with academia, industry and government." One of those partnerships is with some science fiction writers: they've solicited soldiers to write fiction, and basically use that project to get people to think about what's to come in the decades ahead. The people who are just joining the military now will eventually inherit command of the branch. Science fiction isn't a great way to predict the future, but it's a good way to get into the right mindset, so they've asked me to come talk about military science fiction. 

The event is taking place at Georgetown University's Center for Security Studies. I don't believe that it'll be open to the general public, but it will be livestreamed, according to the project's Twitter feed. 

I've been interested in military SF for a while now — I grew up on Star Wars, Starship Troopers, and Ender's Game, and it's something that I've increasingly been working in and thinking about. It's a durable genre, but it's also one that I've been seeing as being incredibly useful, for all of the reasons that TRADOC set up the Mad Scientist Initiative: it's a way to get people to think about what's coming up, whether that's fantastical technologies or wartime scenarios. Defense Secretary James Mattis has spoken often about the importance of reading, with one notable e-mail going viral every now and again in which he outlines its importance: "

"Thanks to my reading, I have never been caught flat-footed by any situation, never at a loss for how any problem has been addressed (successfully or unsuccessfully) before. It doesn't give me all the answers, but it lights what is often a dark path ahead."

Military SF is the same way, I think, and there's a body of work that's being developed in the field that explores the battlegrounds of the near future, aimed at getting people to think about the bigger picture. One notable book is Ghost Fleet, authored by P.W. Singer and August Cole, which they wrote by incorporating all of the technology and geopolitics that experts are developing or watching. They noted that the book could have been written up as a future war white paper, something they described as "printed Ambien." By dumping all that information into a novel, with characters and plot, they found people better related to the information the might have just skimmed. 

The conference will take place on the 8th and 9th. I'll likely be jotting down notes on Twitter, and I'll try and find the livestream link when that's live. 

War Stories: On Sale!

I don't know how long it'll be on sale, but Amazon has marked down War Stories: New Military Science Fiction, edited by myself and Jaym Gates to $3.82 for the Kindle edition! That's a bit off the regular listed price of $5, and quite a bit cheaper than the print edition. 

If you haven't read it yet, it's a good time to pick it up, and read stories from Linda Nagata, Karin Lowachee, Ken Liu, Yoon Ha Lee, James Sutter, Maurice Broadus, Jake Kerr, Janine Spendlove, TC McCarthy, and a bunch of others. 

I'm very proud of this little book, and of all the stories in it. Jaym and I wanted to push against the typical tropes of Military SF, and I think we succeeded. There's things like power armor, AI, and space battles, but all with the backdrop of how warfare affects people. 

So if you're looking for a good book, it's a good opportunity to check it out! 

Gardner Dozois got me into science fiction

Word broke the other day that science fiction editor Gardner Dozois died suddenly. There's been a number of tributes to him from around the science fiction community, and for good reason: for decades, he's been one of the foremost forces in curating the cream of the crop that is the SF short fiction world, via his The Year's Best Science Fiction anthology series. 

I wrote about the series a while ago for my Kirkus Reviews column, where I looked at his work as a writer and later anthologist, but since his passing, I've been thinking about how his work impacted me: he is really one of the ones that got me interested in modern science fiction in a very big way. 

The re-release of Star Wars and Legends of Zelda: Link's Awakening were two big influences when it came to discovering science fiction and fantasy — later followed by Brian Jacques Redwall series — which in turn steered me towards some of the classics: Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein, Frank Herbert, and others. But it was an anthology by Dozois that made me realize that science fiction wasn't a genre that rested entirely on the classics: there were plenty of new and brilliant stories being published every year. During a family trip to New York in 2000 — I think it was a wedding or funeral — we stopped at a Barnes and Noble. I vividly remember the bookstore, and coming across The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eighteenth Annual Edition, and thought back to the classic anthologies that I'd been reading. This seemed like a good way for my teenage brain to read up on a whole bunch of adventures, so that was my purchase for the day. 

To this day, I haven't read all of it: (I read anthologies sporadically), but stories like Stephen Baxter's "On the Orion Line," and John Kessel's "The Juniper Tree" still stand out to me. I've picked up a handful of other Year's Best Anthologies over the years. Dozois always had an impeccable eye for curation, and beyond just the fiction that he included, there was a great survey of the output of the science fiction community: collecting the entire series and reading that alone would give you a great chunk of the genre's recent history. 

I went back to the anthology time and again, and a couple of years later, I first subscribed to Asimov's Science Fiction, which Dozois edited. Again, I found his curation to be fantastic, introducing me to authors such as Allen M. Steele, Walter Jon Williams, Robert Reed, Charles Stross, John Varley, Karen Traviss, Tanith Lee, Charles Sheffield, Nancy Kress, Bruce Sterling, and so many others. I never really read through each issue cover to cover, but Dozois's short introductions to each story served as a good guidepost for what appealed to me the most: adventures in space, biotechnology run amok, robots, and the like. 

Dozois's showed me that science fiction was alive and that it was not only something that was continually changing, but it was something that I could contribute to: I remember stuffing envelopes with terrible stories and mailing them off to Asimovs' and Dozois, only to get the standard form letter back. They were always polite messages that encouraged me to continue to try. 

For a long time, I stopped reading Asimov's and short fiction in general, but it's something that I've returned to in recent months, but when I was at a bookstore, I'd often flip through his latest Years' Best Anthology to see who made the cut for the year, even sitting down and reading through a story or two if I was killing time. 

There's a number of Year's Best Anthologies crowding the market now: Neil Clarke's Best Science Fiction of the Year series and John Joseph Adams' The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy series are just two examples (and there's a ton of other, subgenre-specific ones that have popped up as well), but Dozois's loss leaves a Chicxulub-sized crater in the field. The genre and fandom community will move on, but that hole will never completely be filled, and he's a figure that will leave long-lasting changes on the genre for years to come.

Strategy Strikes Back: now in stores!

Hey you! Yeah, you. Strategy Strikes Back: How Star Wars Explains Modern Military Conflict is now in stores! You can get a copy of your very own. I particularly recommend it if you a) like Star Wars and b) like astute commentary on modern military conflict. This book has both!

You can buy it directly from the University of Nebraska Press, Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, or from your independent bookstore. 

Strategy Strikes Back: How Star Wars Explains Modern Conflict

This is a thing that I'm a part of: Strategy Strikes Back: How Star Wars Explains Modern Military Conflict. The book is edited by my War Stories editing partner Jaym Gates, as well as Max Brooks (yes, that Max Brooks), ML Cavanaugh, and John Amble. It also has a foreword by Gen (RET) Stanley McChrystal (yes, that Stanley McChrystal). The book s hitting stores in May, and you can pre-order it from the University of Nebraska Press or Amazon.

The book came about out of a funny way. While I was freelancing, I pitched a series of articles to StarWars.com, a series of military history-style reports about the various notable battles in the Star Wars films, cartoons, and books. The original essay went through a couple of editing rounds, but it ultimately wasn't a good fit, and I intended to post it here. But I ended up sending it over to August Cole, of the Atlantic Institute and co-author of Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War, with the idea that it might be a good fit with his own site. Somewhere along the line, the idea turned into a book, and it became Strategy Strikes Back.

Along the way, it picked up some interesting authors and essays, including my essay about the Battle of Hoth and the tactical reasons for why the Empire not only lost the battle, but missed a critical point to eliminate the Rebellion because of its mistakes. There's also essays about Clones and Stormtroopers being too distant from the societies that they serve, the destruction of Alderaan, the Jedi and professional militaries, and more. There's also another Norwich MMH alum, BJ Armstrong, in the mix.

I've just finished looking over page proofs of the book, and now, it's just going to be a little bit of time before it hits stores.

Q&A with John Scalzi

I have a new long read up on The Verge. Back in February, I flew down to New York City, where I got to check out our new offices, get some face time with some of my co-workers, and got to sit down with science fiction author John Scalzi.

I've met him a couple of times over the years, and interviewed him one other time for The Verge. This was a formalish interview that lasted for quite a while, and ended up with a nice, in-depth profile of him. It was a fun chat, one that hangs on the fact that his new novel, The Collapsing Empire, just hit bookstores. It's a fun read (the interview and the book), and I recommend checking it out.

Don't ignore the flyover Hugo categories

It's that time of the year: fans from around science fiction fandom are submitting their nominations (deadline is the 17th of March, I think) for this year's Hugo Awards. While I'm filling mine out, I'm reminded of a critical thing: don't ignore the 'flyover' categories.

The Hugos, if  you're not aware, are one of the genre's biggest awards: the Academy Awards of science fiction / fantasy fandom, except that regular readers who attend (or pay for a supporting membership), can vote in them. The biggest share of the votes goes to the best novel and shorter fiction categories, but there's sections for film, television, fan writers and related works.

The past couple of years have seen some controversy over who's being nominated: a handful of factions of conservative to very conservative readers (read: Alt-Right) successfully gamed the system by bloc voting their own nominees and managed to cause an uproar from shocked liberalish fans who were asleep at the wheel. They were really only able to do this for the same reason that the US political primaries attract terrible candidates: nobody cares about the nominations process, and don't show up. When they do, they tend to ignore a whole swath of categories, like Fan Writer, Fanzine, Best Related Work, and so forth. These are pretty specific categories: your typical, casual bookstore patron won't know, if they know about the Hugos in the first place.

It's a shame, because these are areas where there's a lot of interesting things going on: internal genre commentary, fan work, or looks at genre history and production.

Best Related Work is one area that I particularly watch, because I tend to produce it. I write a column on genre history for Kirkus Reviews, write reviews and general commentary for places like Lightspeed Magazine and The Verge. There's a lot of good work out there. Last year alone, there were fantastic biographies for George Lucas, Bram Stoker, Octavia Butler, and Shirley Jackson, really intriguing histories on the book and the word processor's impact on writing, paper, and commentaries on women in the genre. That's all just by looking at my bookshelf next to my desk. There's numerous other works on blogs and fanzines as well. "Safe Space as Rape Room", SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police, and Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth are just a couple of examples: Alt-Right authors with an ax to grind about the world who think that getting an award will validate their shitty view of the world.

It's frustrating, because there's plenty of solid books and works out there that *almost* made the ballot (and not necessarily liberal works, either). I'm thinking of books like Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with his Century by William Patterson Jr., Masters of Modern Science Fiction: Greg Egan, by Karen Burnham (or any of the other books in that series!), or the numerous articles or essays that critically dissect the genre.

The real problem here is that not a lot of people tend to read the things in these categories. Who goes out of their way to read a novella? I think the fiction categories are beginning to change a bit with what places like Tor.com and others are publishing, which is a positive step. It's also an easy thing to fix: look around at the various categories that are out there and see what you're missing. There's a lot of good stuff out there that's well worth the time and energy to pick up.

As you're taking the time to fill out a ballot, don't skip those categories. Look around at what people have been producing, and take the time to read that novella that someone recommended, or that biography of that author.

Proxima Centauri b reality check

Proxima Centauri b: Very, very cool news, but not because it's a planet the size of Earth that's not too far away. What's really neat about this is that it's a planet that's orbiting a Red Dwarf. Red dwarfs are small and cooler than our sun, but they're the most common stars in the universe.

We now know that planets appear to be a pretty common feature around the universe, and this indicates that there could be unimaginable numbers of similar planets in existence. That's pretty exciting stuff right there: out of those numbers, there's going to be other Earth-sized planets right smack in the sweet spot where water can exist.

That's a pretty good starting point for assuming that there's life out there in the universe. Anyone who reads science fiction has probably assumed that we're not alone in the universe. When you consider the sheer number of stars out there, even a small fraction containing water-bearing planets would be an unimaginably high number. A small fraction of that containing life would be the same.

It's exciting news, but there's something interesting with how it's portrayed.

Here's a collection of headlines that have popped up throughout the day this week:

This Planet Just Outside Our Solar System Is 'Potentially Habitable' (NPR)

Discovery of potentially Earth-like planet Proxima b raises hopes for life (Guardian)

Possibly habitable planet found orbiting nearest star (CBS)

A planet orbits around the closest star to our Solar System — and it may be habitable (The Verge)

New neighbor: Scientists discover closest habitable exoplanet (Fox News)

You can see the common point in all of these: Proxima Centauri b does appear to be in the habitable zone of its host star, but that's not to say that Proxima Centauri b is Earth-like, habitable and ready for us to move in.What scientists discovered was a planet that appears to be about the size of Earth, in the habitable zone. But, there's a lot that actually makes a planet habitable. Venus is a planet that's almost exactly the same size as Earth. It's a bit too close to our sun, but it's the atmosphere that really makes it a nasty place to live. It's thick, has lots of pressure and acid. Every spacecraft we've dropped to the surface have melted in a matter of minutes. (We could live in the atmosphere, if we wanted to try some floating cities).

My friend Andria Schwortz pointed out that even if it's Earth-sized, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's a rocky planet like Earth: we literally only know the planet's mass and orbit. It could be a gas planet. It could be a rocky planet without an atmosphere. It could also be an Earth-like planet with an atmosphere and liquid water.

Atmospheres are important, because they help regulate temperatures on the surface, whether or not there's liquid water, and so forth. Earth-sized doesn't necessarily equal habitable for humans. There's a long distance from the right size all the way up to habitable. The atmosphere needs to be right (which means nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide, etc), the right pressure, the right temperatures, and so forth.

Our environment is the product of billions of years of life and some external factors. There's also Earth's plate tectonics and its moon, which could have aided life. There's also Earth's magnetic field, which helps protect the surface from radiation from our Sun. Life is complicated. Our Moon and some of the outer planets are responsible from shielding Earth from devastating asteroid impacts. There were lots of points along the way that made our existence pretty spectacular. The sheer number of planets make the difficulty of life coming through certainly possible.

Also, we're probably not going to set people down here. It's four light years away, which means it would take just under two hundred thousand years to reach this system with our conventional technology, or about the same length of time humanity has existed. These are unimaginably large distances. If we can boost our way up to a sizable fraction of lightspeed, we're still talking about hundreds of years in transit.

So, despite headlines, we're probably not talking about habitable worlds here.

It's certainly closer to Earth than we expected, and around a star type that's incredibly common. That's a good place to start. Four light years means that Proxima Centauri b is going to be really easy to look at and study. Hopefully, it'll provide new imaging and observational techniques, provide some insight into what other solar systems look like and who knows? Maybe a planet that's relatively close that could support some form of life.

My Approach to Book Reviewing

I've been asked a couple of times from various people about reviewing books and my approach to the types of articles that I've written in recent years.

It seems like there's a couple of general forms for these questions / requests:

• How do you go about picking books to review?
• Can I please give you a copy of my book? You don't have to review it, just read it!
• How do I get you a review copy? / How do I get the attention of a reviewer?

Let me preface this by saying that this is my approach, and that generally, reviewing books is a side exercise to most of the reporting that I do and have done. There's not a whole lot of demand for it across the internet, and the loss of genre-specific publications such as SF Signal, A Dribble of Ink, and others tightens up that market considerably.

Because I've been doing this for a little while and because I've written for places that get decent traffic, I'm on the mailing lists for a bunch of publishers, who want me to take a look at what they have. (For a good look into how the publicists work, listen to SF Signal Podcast #275)

What that means is that I'm getting to know my postman and UPS guys pretty well. They stop by my house 2-4 times a week. If you follow me on Twitter or Facebook, you'll probably see that I post up pictures every couple of days of what I get in. Those books pile up fast, and there's no humanly way possible for me to even read a fraction of what comes through the door. Getting the books is fine: I read over most of what I take in, to see if I'm interested: I come across some interesting books that way that I might not have otherwise found.

This is where the triage comes in. The books that don't make that first cut go into a couple of piles:

• 2-3 stacks, for the books that are coming out in the next couple of months. These aren't ones that I'm planning on reading, but they look sufficiently interesting to hang on to, so that I make sure they end up on New Adventures for The Verge.
• Discard pile: these are books that have a) either come out already, b) I have a copy already, or c) it's not a book that I can/want to include on the list for any number of reasons. I've been bringing these piles to my monthly book club for people to take - they'll whittle down the pile, and I'll hand off the copies to family members, friends, etc. If I have a lingering pile by the time I hit a convention, I'll usually drop that off on the free pile. Others will get donated to a library.

If I get a book that I'm interested in, I'll haul it up to my office, where it gets stuck into another chronological pile by release date. This is something I want to review. It looks interesting, and it's essentially my to-get-to pile. There's some books that immediately come to the top as a high priority to read, while there are some others that I'll pick up if I can get to them. Some books, even high-priority books, get dropped off because I miss the release date, or because I get a couple of chapters in and didn't like it.

There's a second pile that I've got going up here - books that I'm planning on reading, but which the release date has passed. I might still post up a review, or I might just read it because I like the author, what the book is about, or the cover art. I tend to keep my eyes open for what others are saying about it. There's some people who's judgement I trust, and if they've liked it, that's helpful to know. (But, it's not failsafe - I've despised some well-regarded books, and loved some books that people hated).

Review dates are important here, for a couple of reasons. Publishers and authors are working to get the word out, and potential buyers, fans and interested readers are looking. This is the best time for a review to go up, because you have a certain amount of attention that's looking to be steered towards a review or commentary on the book. However, how much traffic a book will generate isn't the first consideration that goes through my head when I pick up something to read. In all the time that I've been reviewing (with SF Signal, io9, Lightspeed, Verge, etc), I've never been asked to review a book because it'll generate traffic, or because there's some sort of deal in place at the site.

Finally, I pick up the book and read it! Some books get dropped halfway through so that I can cut my loses and move onto the next one. The pile for the rest of the year? ~20 books, with an additional four that I'm reading now. I tend to read 4-6 books at any given time. I'll take a stack with me and read a couple of chapters at a time between a couple to see what breaks out for me, and when one does, I'll finish that up. There's times when I'll also pick up an audiobook, particularly a book that's taking me a long time to get through, to listen to when I'm driving, which helps move the pace along a bit.

When I'm done with the book, I'll jot down a rough outline and get it written up while it's fresh in my mind. I don't usually take notes or anything like that, but I'll go back and read up on a passage or chapter if I need to. Then, the review gets posted in the appropriate venue (currently, either this blog, Verge or Lightspeed), and I move onto the next entry in the pile.

With that in mind, here's a couple of questions that I've gotten:

Can I please give you a copy of my book? You don't have to review it, just read it!

Erm, no. I've seen this question pop up more than once, particularly along self-published authors, and I'm not sure why it's only in that small subset (I could be wrong, but I've never had a traditionally published author ask me that).

The problem with this question is that most of my reading is tied up with professional commitments. I have a finite amount of time in the day to read, and there's already a waiting list. If you're doing the digital equivalent of shoving a book in my face with a demand to read it, you're demanding my time, which is finite.

The books that I'm reading for review are ones that I deem interesting and worthy for the outlets I write for, and that's judgement that I've honed as a reviewer, and a quality that my editors seem to like. For my own pleasure, I'm picking up books that interest me the most.

How do I get you a review copy?

I've got a ton of books already, and adding more to the pile means that the mailman / UPS guys have to make another trip over. If you're a regularly published author (I.E., not self-published) with a publicity department, feel free to have your publicist get in touch. If you're self-published, free free to send me a link / blurb. If I like what I see, I'll let you know. If I don't, I'm not really interested in having a book that I have to get rid of - it's not a good use of resources for you or me.

Why do you hate self-published books?!

I've been accused of this. The short answer is, I don't. I don't pick them up all that often, but there's reasons for that: there's a whole publicity apparatus set up by the major publishers, and it's hard to get the word out in the flood of other books. I've read and reviewed self-published books — I recently picked up Cumulus by Eliot Peper and reviewed it for io9. A mutual friend recommended the book, and he queried me about how I he could get me a copy.

Most of the time, I'll pass on a book if I'm queried - remember, there's a whole system of piles - because it's something I'm simply not interested in. (I reject a ton of traditionally published books, too!)

How can I stand out to reviewers?

Book publicity is hard, tiring and discouraging. I've been there: I had to market War Stories: New Military Science Fiction when that came out a couple of years ago, and it was an exhausting process to get people to look at the book. Some colleagues in the reviewing world picked it up and some didn't.

The best way to stand out to reviews is to have an outstanding book. That might sound glib, but I'm being serious. Every author thinks that their book is the best out there. Some things do help: professional messaging, like a press package (blurb, cover art, a handful of review excerpts, etc) goes a long way.

Packaging your book helps too. While I primarily go by the blurb on the back of the book to decide whether or not I read it, the cover does make an impression. It doesn't always factor in, but seriously, don't half-ass it with Microsoft Paint.

Obviously, there's exceptions to every rule: there's plenty of great books with terrible covers out there (Just look at all the modern covers for Ringworld), and there's plenty of great covers with terrible books (just look at Ernie Cline's Armada).

What should I do if you tell me you're not interested in my book?

Move on to the next reviewer. Seriously, move on.

Your book might not have worked for a number of reasons: I might not like that type of book; I might have reviewed something like it already; I might have too many books on my plate as it is.

If you decide to argue the point, I'm just going to delete your e-mail. If you tell me that I'm biased or that I hate authors/self-publishing/Fantasy/whatever, I've lost interest. I've already decided that I'm not interested in your book: what makes you think that I'm interested in your argument about it? Being rude isn't going to help you.

The long and short of it comes down to resource and time management. I'd like to read everything, but I have to be selective. I try and make sure that everything that comes through the door at least gets publicized with a picture, and that I review the stuff that I like and that I think other people will like. The main criteria that I have for a review? I liked a book enough to tell people that I think that they should read it. Everything up to that point is finding the right book. I don't find all of them, but I do try.

Anyway, that's my approach.

So Long, and Thanks For All The Trilobites

I regret to announce — this is The End. I am going now. I bid you all a very fond farewell.

So, yesterday was my last day at io9. I've spent the last year as their Weekend Editor, running the site on Saturday / Sunday, filling in and generally holding down the fort on the slow part of the week. I've been there even longer as a contributor. Now, it's time to move on.

It’s been a hell of a ride.

I started writing for io9 back in 2008, after I answered a call for interns. I think I skipped pass the intern phase and became the site’s ‘research fellow’. I had written for a couple of places like SF Signal, but this was a whole new thing. Under Annalee Newitz, I had the chance to write about a whole new mix of things - Trilobites, Stormtroopers, spaceflight, books that should be movies (three of which have become or will be TV shows!), and scored a big hit with a rant on Military Science Fiction.

My term was up after 6 months, but I kept contributing the occasional book review or commentary. io9 opened a whole lot of doors for me, professionally. It helped me become a better writer and thinker - the range of articles that Annalee Newitz, Charlie Jane Anders, Meredith Woerner, Lauren Davis, James Whitbrook, Germain Lusslier, and many others put together shaped how I looked at science fiction, writing, science, current events, and so much more. It’s helped me get regular writing gigs, such as with Kirkus Reviews and Barnes and Noble, and to travel to places like the Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop.

In June 2015, I figured out that I didn’t want to stay at my day job anymore, and was able to join up regularly as io9's Weekend Editor. The new gig allowed me to write about a ton of things that I loved writing about.

All of that is coming to a close. I’m jumping over to The Verge at the end of this month, something that’s exciting, but also slightly scary. It’s time for a bit of a change, and it's the next step.

It’s hard to encapsulate everything I’m proud of with io9 - the list above is only a fraction of what I’ve done. io9 is genuinely an online home, and while I won’t be adding to it anymore, I’ll be keeping my eyes on the place.

Destination: Venus

I have a new nonfiction article up on Clarkesworld Magazine, Destination: Venus, a followup to Destination: Mars from last year.

Like the last post, it covers a topic that I've been getting more and more interested in: how did we discover the Solar System, and how did we interpret those findings? Science Fiction is the ideal medium for making sense of the potential for life elsewhere in the galaxy or solar system, and what I'm finding most interesting is how seemingly at ease people were with the idea of life on other planets just a century ago.

It's interesting: Venus is so much different from Mars, and our stories about it are quite a bit different, yet the same. There's more about Mars as a potential second Earth, even though it's smaller and colder.

Like Mars, though, as we learned more about Venus, the stories changed. We couldn't live on Venus and nothing could, but SF has the enthusiastic optimism about the world: maybe we can terraform it, live in floating cities, or merely study it.

Read Destination Venus over on Clarkesworld Magazine.