NOTE: I’m unfortunately going to need to head home Saturday night, which means that my Sunday reading will be canceled. Very sorry for that, but hopefully we’ll have a rain check opportunity next year!

I’ll be at Readercon in Quincy, MA (Boston area) next weekend, with some fun panels, an opportunity to come have coffee with me, and a reading from one of my works in progress! I’ll also be joining the Meet the Pros(e) party Friday night. I’ve been going to Readercon pretty much yearly for at least the last thirteen years, and it’s always fun.

AI and the Universal Translator
Friday 3pm, Salon B

The universal translator, invaluable to authors and screenwriters who need to handwave away English-speaking aliens, has been a longtime goal for technologists. Most of us are familiar with the slapdash usefulness—though occasional butchery—of modern AI-based translations. Google Translate has already been used by US military personnel abroad when no human translator was handy. What can SF learn from the use, misuse, and politics of AI translation?

Kaffeklatsch – Friday 6pm

Just a chance to chat! Want to follow up about that AI panel, or anything else? My kaffeeklatsches are usually lightly attended, so it’s a nice opportunity to chat.

What has RWA Got that We Ain’t Got?
Saturday, 3pm Salon 4

In the wake of the Romance Writers of America’s 2020 meltdown over institutional racism, then-SFWA President Mary Robinette Kowal extended an open invitation to our genre compatriots from Romancelandia to bring their enthusiasm and antiracist energy to our community, prompting a discussion among authors who straddle the Romance and SFF worlds about how different the RWA and SFWA are as organizations. What are some of the ways they differ, and what can we as a community learn from the RWA’s example, both positive and negative? Panelists may also discuss the RWA’s recent bankruptcy filing, and what it says about the organization’s struggles.

Reading, Sunday 11:30am Blue Hills

I’ll be reading from either the book I just finished a few months ago (tentative title, THE DEPTH OF DECEIT) or one of my two works in progress – an SF detective story that’s my attempt to revisit CLAUDIUS REX in the age of ChatGPT, or else my Secret Project.

So what else is going on? As of Monday, my term as Vice President of SFWA is finished! As you may have noticed, I decided during my term to keep a very light social media footprint. That was for a number of reasons, but I mostly wanted to make sure that my opinions about various topics, including AI, were not confused for official positions. Plus, SFWA’s just kind of a lot of work, and if I had time to blog, I had time to try to plow through my backlog.

Now that’s done, and I’m looking to find a new balance. Social media and blogging have changed quite a bit just in the last two years, and it will be interesting to see where I decide to land.

For those of you wondering, have I been writing? Have I ever! I wrote two books in an anticipated three book sequence of hard SF mysteries, tentatively titled THE LIGHT FROM DEATH and THE DEPTH OF DECEIT. They’re both with a new detective character, Arjuna Taltry, and they’re styled after Dorothy Sayers’s Peter Wimsey books. One of the things that always bothered me about Wimsey as a character is that he never really grappled with his largely-unearned wealth and position in society. He did good things with it, sometimes, but it mostly afforded him the opportunity to swoop in and be listened to. Combine that with all the billionaire prattle of colonizing other planets – and some thinking about the kind of societies they’re likely to create there – and I found it all to dovetail nicely.

I’m working on another near-SF mystery, the one I might read from at Readercon. I’ve done a lot of thinking about AIs in the last few years, and while I have a soft spot in my heart for my novella CLAUDIUS REX, I find that it no longer reads the same. AIs have lost their sheen of intellectual genius, and now that people are engaging with machines that talk like people, the experience is… not what we thought it would be. Which is fascinating to me! Could Asimov have written CAVES OF STEEL if his whole audience expected R. Daniel Olivaw to be a compulsive bullshitter?

Finally, a project just for me, handwritten only, something that I started during a time of stress when I needed to get away from screens for a while and have just kept going. This is one of those, if I pull this off it’ll be amazing kind of things. Somewhere in the vector space between Agatha Christie and RED NOISE, with a splash of T. Kingfisher. It might never see the light of day (unless I read from it at Readercon…) but I’m enjoying it immensely. It contains a few of my favorite things, which tend to be not so much bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens, and more… poison and flamethrowers.