The Morning News Tournament of Books, Current Reading, Odds 'n' Ends

If you came here via facebook or twitter, please note that while I won't be on social media much this year, I will be blogging--and those posts should auto-populate to my fb and twitter accounts.Last week, the Morning News announced the 16 titles for its 2015 Tournament of Books. Annihilation is one of them and, as my editor said, it would be only appropriate for Annie to be knocked out in the first round and come back as a zombie. But we'll see. It's one of those situations where you say it's an honor to be nominated...and you actually mean it. In non-morning news, thanks to Joe at Book People for choosing Area X: The Southern Reach Trilogy as his book of the year. Thanks also to The Stake for making the publication of the trilogy it's pop-culture event of the year. You can find highlights of Area X best-of-year honors here.Since the Southern Reach tour ended, I've been spending time at home relaxing and reading--and thinking a lot about the next novel, Borne. I tend to take a fair amount of time living with the characters in my mind before writing a rough draft. But I've also made good progress on a draft. Part of that progress is always about what you surround yourself with reading-wise. In this case, Timothy Morton's Hyperobjects, which Matthew Cheney talked about here. I'm also slowly savoring William Vollman's rather brilliant Imperial before tackling his 7-volume work on violence--meanwhile devouring Zizek's much smaller tome on violence, Violence.Some of this feeds into what I will talk about at the Sonic Acts 2015 Geological Imagination Festival in Amsterdam next month. Ostensibly I'm reading from the Southern Reach trilogy and participating in a Q&A, but I've decided to preface that with some comments on the ways in which fiction has failed to keep current with what is happening to the world--as well as delineating those pathways and approaches that seem to hold promise.Speaking of the former, I have to say my most depressing current fiction reading has been in the post-Collapse or mid-Collapse genre--which most commonly now takes the form of a novel in which some virus wipes out all but X percent of the population. Never all but 1 percent, though, since no doubt that would be confused by reader with The One Percent. Almost inevitably, these novels reduce down their character lists to a pretty generic and non-representative core sample of the population and proceed to get on with the Nostalgia Show, the longing for the life before--i.e., the unsustainable one we're living now, which is also a misery for so many--whilst discreetly hiding the bodies of millions and millions somewhere offstage. Incredibly, in most of these books global warming is just a kind of nebulous thing, no hyperobject or true catastrophe but perhaps responsible for some storms and such off in the distance. In any event, real life--and the future we live in right now--is much more effective a critique of this approach than anything I could say here.On a more pleasant note, there are some books I read over the holidays that I liked quite a bit and I'll blog about them soon. As Ann and I read and research more for The Big Book of SF (Vintage), I'll talk about that as well.In addition to the Amsterdam conference, this spring I'll be appearing at the University of Buffalo, Tallahassee's Word of South lit-music festival (with Vernon Reid!), and at MIT. Over the summer Ann and I will teach at the Yale Writers' Conference and at the Shared Worlds teen writing camp. I'll post a full schedule sometime in the next week.Outside of that, it appears I'll probably be on NPR's Science Friday (February 6) if all goes well and The Atlantic online will be publishing a long tell-all about the story behind the Southern Reach. My interview with Richard House, author of the fantastic novel The Kills, will post at The Millions next week. I've also turned in an introduction for Melville House's edition of the Strugatsky Brothers Dead Mountaineer's Inn, am working on another intro for a Ligotti reprint from Penguin Classics, and will complete an intro for PM Press's reprint of Moorcock's Breakfast in the Ruins later this year as well.In blurbing news, I've been happy to blurb Kelly Link's forthcoming story collection, Leah Thomas' first novel, and Rikki Ducornet's latest nonfiction collection.And, I've not really had time to blog about it, but Italian editions of the Southern Reach Trilogy will come out this year. Indonesia, Finnish, and Czech Republic rights recently sold, too--meaning Area X will appear in a total of 22 countries.And, also, happy to see Jenn Brissett's Elysium made the PKD Award finalist list. Congrats, Jenn!Finally, why is there a photo of our cat Neo at the top of this post? Just because.