Just Imagine...

Thu 24 Apr 2008, 16:56 GMT

Conreport: 2005-09-02 - 2005-09-05: Dragon*Con

Although I officially concluded the tripreport writing of my 2+ year backpacking trip well over a year ago, I left off with me not yet back home. Between Australia and the Netherlands lay a period of nearly three months which I spent in the USA. Most of that time I shan't be telling you about, but in this conreport, and one further tripreport to come (probably at least another 4-5 months hence), I do want to toss out some pictures from that time, as well as whatever words come to my mind to accompany them.

So. Dragon*Con. One of the largest science fiction conventions in the USA (and hence the world). Held every year in Atlanta, city of peachtree everything. Due to one of the more active Wheel of Time fans living in Atlanta, Dragon*Con has had a Wheel of Time track for as long as I've been aware of its existence, and has thus always been a con which I vaguely kept tabs on. This year (remember, we're back in the second half of 2005 here; yes, yes, I know - my backlog has grown to disgraceful proportions) would be a special year for the Wheel of Time track, as one of the Guests of this Dragon*Con would be none other than Robert Jordan himself. And so I'd plotted and schemed from my secret lair deep in the heart of Australia, to find not just myself able to attend, but also to get to hang out with my good friends redNathalie, Sam Brown, and Isabel (who, upon learning of me attending, could do nought but to fly over from the Netherlands for this in order to show me once and for all who truly was the more rabid WoT fan (it's a good thing I'd already left my rabid fan phase behind me, or I'd have been quite distraught at being outclassed like that)). :)

There are two main things to do at a con like Dragon*Con. The first is to attend one of the innumerable panels and events and discussions and presentations being held constantly in one of the three dozen rooms which exist for this purpose. (I shall say a bit about the various panels I attended later on.) The second is to people watch. Or more accurately, to costume watch. Dragon*Con was host to countless superheroes, hordes of storm troopers, legions of princess leias (princesses leia?), multitudes of anime characters, flocks of movie characters, and more digital cameras recording these all than one can shake a very large stick at.
What occurs to me though, as I sort through these photos, is how almost every costumed person at Dragon*Con is someone from popular culture. It's Batman, Darth Vader, Spiderman, Vash, Master Chief, The Witch King, Green Lantern, Prince, Starfire, or even more obscure comic book personalities which only the most hardcore geeks will recognize on sight. And then I contrast this to the closest equivalent to conventions we have in the Netherlands, CastleFest or the Elf Fantasy Fair (happening the very weekend during which I'm starting to write this here weblog entry), and there you might see a single Sauron or Jack Sparrow striding through, but beyond that people seem to be much more creative in their costumes, giving their own interpretations of certain archetypes, unrestrained by the need to be "recognized" as being someone specific, though being just as happy to pose near-constantly for photos. It's curious how this distinction exists, and I wonder where it comes from. I don't think it's just the science fiction background versus the fantasy setting...

Anyway, so yeah, much of our time at Dragon*Con was spent milling through the crowd and taking photos. The confined space, bad lighting and large crowds didn't make for ideal circumstances (suddenly I appreciate our outdoor events a whole lot more), but it was still good fun. We went exploring past the "comic alley", through the artist exhibition area (minor "oops" as I was making disparaging remarks about Darrell K. Sweet's artwork, only to realize he was standing right there (in front and to the side of his desk, rather than behind it) - but somehow I suspect he's heard it all before) and on to the other hotel where all the track rooms were located. Great atmosphere, really - from Klingons doing karaoke (purple rain), to a remote-controlled robot darth vader wheeling about. The first and only panel we looked in on this Friday evening was one about MMORPG games, which had some interesting bits, but was filled with way too many pet peeves and marketing talk of the form our company x, with title y out at time z ....

Luckily other panels were a lot more interesting. For example, the Saturday morning started (after free waffles for breakfast! woo!) with a really interesting talk by the commander of the Apollo XII, Captain Richard F. Gordon (man, I just rule by taking notes like that) :) on the Gemini and Apollo space program. My space geek years aren't so far behind me that I didn't get a kick out of this - major kudos to redNathalie for dragging me along to this. :)
Next up we wandered on to "An hour with Jack Dann and Robert Sawyer", respectively an Australian author (I'd seen him a few months before at Continuum in Melbourne) and a Canadian author. This wasn't a very popular panel; I don't think there were more than two dozen people there, so they got off the stage, pulled up chairs, and we all clustered together at the front of the room, after which Jack and Robert and a pretty entertaining and interesting back and forth on the advantages of living outside the USA, from the point of view of a writer. (For example, even though they're not amongst the best known authors in the USA, they were both bestsellers in their respective countries.)

Next up was a Q&A with Robert Jordan. True to form, we managed to secure some front row seats.

This Q&A session consisted of two parts (after starting off with Jordan doing the usual pronounciations). The first part consisted of questions which were collected ahead of time at the Dragon*Con WoT track website, and the second part of audience questions. During this second part I asked a multi-faceted question about souls ("Are [souls] atomic, can they be split? If it is true that you can meet yourself in the Worlds of If, is that a copy of the soul, or a reflection, or the same soul living in different worlds?") on behalf of Minx, hoping to crush or confirm half a dozen theories in one fell swoop, but alas, Jordan mostly RAFOd it, on account of him maybe wanting to do something with that information still. (Which in itself is a hopeful thing. The Worlds of If have always fascinated me, so returning to them (probably in relation to freeing Moiraine?) is going to be a great goodness.) He did say that souls could not be split though, so that at least is a final end to the silly theories about Both Elayne and Min and Aviendha being Ilyena reborn.

I shan't mention any of the countless other questions which were asked, as Isabel brought her tape recorder, and has made available a pretty thorough transcript of it all (and even the audio is available if you want to get the complete experience).

After lunch and picking up books, we went to stand in line for the Jordan signing, and we attended another one the following morning. These were really nice; rather than being all fanboy-ish, I instead talked travel with Harriet and Jordan for a bit. They apparently went on quite a few round the world trips together for periods of 3-4 months. Man, I need to become a famous author so I can go do the same... (Oh wait, no - web development allows me to do this already, too.) ^_^
During these two signing sessions I also asked about the feel of the warder bond when stepping through a Gateway: apparently the increased distance is not felt at all until the Gateway closes. (I should've followed up by asking if this still held if the person on the other side walked around the Gateway, but alas, that's hindsight...) I also learned that Rand/LTT has not been reborn before during the Third Age (e.g. Rand is the first reincarnation of the LTT soul since Dragonmount was created). That should put at least one category of Third Destroyer speculation to rest.

Probably the most dangerous aspect of all of Dragon*Con is the dealer room, which we visited a short time later. Sooooooooo many shiny things, all calling out to me to be bought. I was mostly strong though, until I was ambushed by Red versus Blue people. Honestly, I can not be held responsible for buying their DVDs - they're just too good. ^_^ Also here was the "walk of fame", where various actors (and porn stars? erm... ooookay?) were signing photographs for outrageous amounts of money. Mostly uninteresting, except that ooh! This included the whole bunch of Firefly actors who were present: Inara, Jayne, Shepherd Book and Kaylee. (The following day we would attend a panel with them, which was quite cool, and totally overcrowded. Us geeks do know a good TV show when it's cancelled on us... *shakes fist at Fox*)

For dinner we managed to get the whole group together (being me, redNathalie, Isabel, Sam and his brother Jake - we'd been meeting up on and off during the last two days, and then wandering off in separate directions again) and had quite yummy dinner and good conversation. Afterward we spent more time wandering through the Marriot and photographing cool costumes (there was this huge group of people with costumes from the Chronicles of Riddick, including a rather striking Riddick himself, and more necromongers than you could shake a stick at).

One of the random quirky cool things about Dragon*Con is DragonConTV, which is displaying on monitors throughout the two hotels, and includes the most random and cool bits of conversation. I recently discovered that the treasure trove of all these clips is actually available online. (Go watch!)
Probably my favorite of the whole bunch was the "Ant People" clip:

quote:

Dear dragon*conTV,
Have you ever ridden the Marriot elevator all the way up to the top floor just to play in the plants and make fun of all the tiny ant people below?
[pirate_lass]

Dear pirate_lass,
Yes indeed!

However, one day we were mocking the tiny ant people...and they spotted us.

Naturally we retreated deeper into the plants.

After four days of living on nothing but ice and discarded room service, we'd learned our lesson.
[dragon*con psychotic]

Naturally, a good idea like that had to be followed up on, and so that's what we (being just me, Sam and redNathalie at this point again, I think) did. Wow, that hotel is pretty damned high! Lots of fun taking pictures. We then dropped down to go visit one of the infamous Klingon room parties (they always have the best food), before finding a quiet spot at the bottom of the elevators to just lounge about at for a while and shoot the breeze (and/or pictures of said elevators).

Sunday started off with waffles again (yay!), then that second Jordan signing, and then a second Q&A session with Jordan and Harriet. Jordan was on a roll with his stand-up comedian act (with great support from Harriet) during this session, including a great bit about how he was the perfect man because he was gullible, followed by advice on how to survive if you as a man forgot to put the toilet seat down and were woken up in the middle of the night by hearing a splash and a shriek. If you're a fan, definitely listen to the audio for that.
I asked if it was time itself which was circular in his books, or only history: Jordan answered that it's time itself. The sun will never die. For more, I once again refer you to the transcript.

Later that day we also attended the Serenity panel. I don't remember any specific bits from here, other than an amusing episode with refills for the water glasses which you really had to be there to appreciate. It was cool to see these people interact, and swap stories though.
We left the panel a question or two before it ended in order to attend the Anne McAffrey signing (I wanted to get her short story in Legends signed, as part of my quest to have every story in there signed) - but unfortunately they were only allowing 75 people in line total, and that had long since filled up. :(

The main highlight of the Monday was attending a session of Robot Wars, which really was as violent and entertaining as on TV. The main downside was spending an hour and a half in the completely understaffed and overfilled quad-S extra security line at the airport, and missing the flight out of Atlanta, and it definitely appeared as if most of the people in that line were missing their flights. That still gets my blood up, though lots of fudge and icecream were applied afterward to make up for it.

Aaaaanyway. So yes, that was Dragon*Con, more or less. Sorry it's taken me so long. More tripreports to follow soon, for large values of soon.

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Thu 6 Mar 2008, 14:52 GMT

Rumors of my demise...

Aaaaaaaand... we're back.

Note: If you sent me email between Sunday noon (CET) and Tuesday morning-ish, I probably won't have received it. Please send again!


Bleh. That took way too long. A third party took over everything from the bankrupt company, and moved all the servers to a new data center, as the old one was indeed going to turn off the power on Monday morning. (Bad Telecity! Bad!) So, servers were moving and getting hooked up between Sunday noon and Monday evening. Most servers reportedly came back up then, but not mine, and I had to wait until just now for this third party to work their way through the issue list to contact me, so I could identify the server and they could see why it wouldn't come up. Turns out it was booting into the BIOS for unknown reasons.

Bleh.

I switched my nameservers to have my email delivered somewhere else as of Tuesday evening, when it was becoming obvious the server wasn't about to come back up. I thought email servers have the habit of retrying delivery attempts for at least three days, but obviously things have changed in recent years and this is no longer the case. The oldest mail I got after Tuesday evening was from Monday morning, but that was just a trickle, and judging by volume it looks like most mail servers these days give up on their delivery attempts after barely half a day. Meh. If I'd known that, I'd have pointed those MX records somewhere else far sooner. So yeah, I've lost all email that was sent to me from Sunday noon until Monday morning, and most email that was sent from Monday morning until Tuesday morning.

Still, overall the damage isn't too bad. Four days of downtime for my website isn't cool, but on the other hand, there's nothing really critical on here, so I've survived. (That said, this does give extra impetus to my plans to set up a new server and have an even better story for fallback and backup than I have now.)

Anyway, welcome back everyone. Hope you didn't miss me too much. :)

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Thu 28 Feb 2008, 16:09 GMT

Expected downtime notification

Apparently the company I'm colocating my server with has just gone bankrupt. I'm going to need to scramble to find alternative colocation. Downtime for both this website and my email is expected sometime during the next few days, though I'm really hoping I can keep it to a minimum.
More news as it comes in.
(Wheee! As if I didn't already have enough to do!) :/

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Mon 25 Feb 2008, 23:53 GMT

SFWA Presidency

John Scalzi wrote a rather interesting flame of Andrew Burt running for the presidency of the SFWA. You know, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America: the organization which gives out the Nebulas, and which you don't really hear much from... except in this last year, when they (in a commission under the leadership of this Andrew Burt) seemed to have been trying to run along with the big boys from the MAFIAA (straight off the nearest cliff).
Luckily that was rather loudly shouted down by such prominent SFWA members as Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross, but still, it did a rather tremendous amount of damage to the public image of the SFWA. And so now this same guy is trying to become president of the organization.

This really makes for some rather engaging flaming. :)

Even John Gruber's I am high as a kite line has been applied. Wheee! Fun reading for the whole family!
*has always had a soft spot for a good flamefest*

Also, Old Man's War and The Android's Dream by John Scalzi are now totally at the top of my to read pile. :D

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Mon 3 Dec 2007, 21:01 GMT

Final notes on Berlin.

So I finally finished sorting through and editing my photos from Berlin. I've edited the previous weblog entry to include some photos from those first few days, and intend to give a very quick overview of the rest of my stay in Berlin in this here post in order to provide a framework for the rest of the photos. Shiiiiny photos. There's a couple where my wide angle lens really brought forth more from a scene than I'd expected, though looking through them all, I'm noticing I'll need to be careful not to overuse the lens.

Anyway, where were we? Oh yes, Web 2.0 Expo. Berlin. Second day of the conference. Skipping the keynotes. Then OpenSocial dev session. It became ever more apparent how unfinished the whole OpenSocial stuff really was; a significant part of the examples Patrick attempted to show didn't work. Quite cool stuff though, albeit the loudness of the background noise from the expo floor meant it was all a bit hard to follow at times. I sadly didn't have time to sit through the entire dev session, as I wanted to attend the next conference talk on "conversational design", which specifically focused on communities. Lots of stuff which was applicable to the various online forums I frequent.

The next day had me attending sessions on "agile development" (great slides! photos of sticky notes with hand-drawn illustrations), a rather disappointing session on accessibility (which was a great shame, as it could've been so good and useful), and Cory Doctorow giving what I assume was his usual spiel on the state of copyright and software patents and all that other bad stuff. He wasn't as inspirational as I'd expected him to be, although this might just've been me being somewhat pre-occupied.

Then the closing keynotes, with Tristan Nitot's Firefox talk as the only highlight (shame I haven't seen any photos from that pop up), and that wrapped up the official part of the conference. Luckily however they mentioned there'd be a Werewolf session going on in the Web2Open part of the expo, and so I decided to check that out. This turned out to nearly be the highlight of the conference for me (not beating out the typography session of course, but it was a much more worthwhile time than a whole lot of the rest of the talks). Werewolf, for those too lazy to follow the link, is a party game where one or more people are "werewolves" killing off a "villager" each "night" of the game, while during the "day" the entire group of villagers (including the unknown werewolves) go lynch one of their own (after copious amounts of discussion), hoping to kill off the werewolves before they become the majority. It's a great game for paying attention to people's behaviour and trying to too stand out too much for fear of being labeled a werewolf, but also needing to not be too quiet, and to watch everyone at once to see who might be giving themselves away as being the werewolf.

After werewolf, most of those who'd been playing the game headed to Charlottenburg to a pretty decent restaurant, where much time was spent in geeky conversation and culinary bliss. After this the group split up, everyone going their separate ways, with me ending up tagging along with what suddenly turned out to be a Dutch-only (worse: TU Delft-only) gathering - Alper, Cristiano, Reinier and (for the length of the train-ride) Melinda. Always weird to switch back languages when you're not expecting to need to do so. Eventually, after many "no, I know where we should be going!" remarks, the four of us ended up underneath the giant television tower at Alexanderplatz, for beer (them) and waffles (me). Way nice to just hang out.

Didn't do much the following day. I headed out to Schloss Charlottenburg in between rain showers. Managed to stand in front of it just as the clouds were randomly parting to allow the sun to shine gorgeous golden light on the front of the building, while dark grey clouds kept racing by behind. Very awesome!
I remember how lian remarked just a couple of days earlier on how I totally rave about light, and I guess that's really true. Ever since I became a "photographer" (rather than someone who takes pictures), it's been like in that Charles de Lint quote:

Originally expressed by Charles de Lint in The Invisibles:

After that, I never looked at anything the same again. I watched light, saw everything through an imaginary frame. Clouds didn't just mean a storm was coming; they were an ever-changing picture of the sky, a panorama of movement and light that affected everything around them - the landscape, the people in it. I learned to pay attention and realized that once you do anything you look at is interesting. Everything has its own glow, its own place in the world that's related to everything else around it. I looked into the connectedness of it all and nothing was the same for me again.

So yeah, I saw this light, and basically kept standing in front of the building for the entire twenty minutes that it lasted, nearly freezing my hands off, but thinking that totally worth it. In the end, of the 23 photos I took which contained that light, there's only this one to show you - but hey, that's all anyone could wish for, really. :) (Just compare with the shots to the right, which show more "regular" views on the building, when the light isn't being all magical.)

In the afternoon I went wandering in the shopping district down south of the Tiergarten, visiting such famously boring icons as the KaDeWe (which does have to get a nod of recognition for the huge kitchy white Christmas tree standing at the entrance), as well as any and all bookstores I came across. Pretty boring, really - but nice.

The next day, for my final few hours in Berlin, I went snapping some shots of the Reichstag by day, feeling happy that I wasn't standing in line to go up to the dome, especially as the temperature was absolutely freezing cold. (I didn't realize how cold until an hour later when I was sitting in a warm restaurant having a late lunch, and saw on the twitter stream of one of the other Berlin attendees that it was snowing; which prompted me to look out of the window and marvel that yes indeed, so it was. *g*)

Anyway, yeah, loooong line. And pretty sky. :) This was the shot above all others which made me really glad I'd brought along the wide angle. I already knew it was essential for landscapes due to Norway (don't worry - I will edit those photos too... some day), but I'm really pleased it can work this well in an urban setting. Now if only I can train myself to see similar opportunities more often...

A long train ride later (it's been far too long since I had that much reading time), I was back home - and thus Berlin ended. Not as nice a visit as the previous time (yeah, yeah - I *know* I still need to write a tripreport of that as well :) - if only there wasn't an order of magnitude more photos involved), and the conference wasn't quite everything I'd hoped it to be - but in the end I did learn quite a few things, and had fun, so I guess it was all worthwhile.

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Thu 22 Nov 2007, 21:37 GMT

Thanksgiving 2007 at the American Book Center: the spoils

As I did this both last year and the year before, this has now become an unbreakable tradition. Since I'm again cross-posting between the message board and the weblog, a short intro for any non-messageboard people who weren't weblog people yet last year either (there's some, according to my feed subscription counts): English science fiction and fantasy books are somewhat scarce in regular bookstores in the Netherlands. Yet there is one place to go to, one place which makes up for it all. The American Book Center imports directly from both the US and the UK, and as such has a collection that many people from both the US and the UK have mentioned to be larger and more diverse than anything they know. Members of the ABC and students get a 10% discount. And every year at Thanksgiving, they add another 10% discount on top of this. (20% discount is a big deal in the Netherlands, especially with the lack of choice.) And so there's a yearly pilgrimage to stock up on all those books that everyone's been meaning to buy for a long time now...

This last year has been good to me, and so to give thanks I for once allowed myself to skip the ritual pass at the end of the book-gathering phase to reluctantly put books back onto the shelves. (The other reason for skipping this was that Karin (the ABC's book buyer for the Science Fiction & Fantasy section) kept following me and immediately re-stocking everything I took off the shelves, so putting any books back wouldn't actually be possible either. *g*) The final list is thus... erm... perhaps a bit excessive. Maaaybe. But hey, I had empty bookshelf space, and that just can't be allowed to exist! *g*

So, herewith, in alphabetical order, the spoils:
* Isaac Asimov - Robot Dreams, Robot Visions, The Caves of Steel, The Naked Sun, The Robots of Dawn, Foundation, Foundation and Empire, Second Foundation, Foundation's Edge, Foundation and Earth, Prelude to Foundation and Forward the Foundation. (These all were my main goal for getting this year, same as last year I went to get all of Pratchett. Asimov was the author who first got me reading science fiction. I'd read fantasy and science fiction before him, but it wasn't until I picked up I, Robot (which my father was reading, and had let lie on the table) that I took it upon myself to go to the public library and find more. Yet my personal library so far has been pretty much devoid of Asimov. No more! Still missing is Robots and Empire, the sequel to The Robots of Dawn, which Bantam for some reason hasn't republished. I got Karin to order the UK edition of it though, so I'll be able to add that to my shelves next time I go to Amsterdam.)
* Iain M. Banks - Use of Weapons. (Still cautiously exploring the Culture universe. So far I've liked two, but hated one. Of the others, this was the only one which had a coverblurb which really appealed.)
* Mark Budz - Till Human Voices Wake Us. (An author I've never heard of, and a coverblurb which didn't appeal all that very much. But the cover is shiny, and David Brin praised one of his earlier books (which sadly wasn't in stock (edit: ooh, but I see I have it (Clade) in my to read piles already, picked up from a sale at the ABC some time ago)), and I do always like to include a few oddball hard sf choices; it's a gamble which, when it pays off, often does so in a spectacularly rewarding way.)
* Neil Gaiman - Fragile Things. (I'm one of those strange people who does not worship the very ground his Neilness has walked upon, but hey, I have liked some of his books before, and so I thought I'd try some of his short fiction. I got this book in hardcover, as that was on sale and thus cheaper than the paperback, plus it's the really shiny version with the translucent dust jacket and pretty butterfly.)
* John Twelve Hawks - The Traveler. (One of the ever-increasingly large class of books set in the very near future where the erosion of privacy and the total surveillance society form the main component of the book's setting. These are subjects I care deeply about, and I know to look to science fiction authors to be able to say intelligent things about them, so this was an obvious book to pick up. I noticed a sequel as well, but it was only out in hardcover yet, and that'd be slightly too large a gamble for an unknown author. (As an aside, after long deliberations on if I should list this guy under the T or under the H, what swayed me to the H was that that's where the ABC put him.))
* Frank Herbert - Dune, Dune Messiah, Children of Dune, God Emperor of Dune, Heretics of Dune and Chapterhouse Dune. (Slowly but surely I'm picking off all those old classics which I read years ago but never had gotten around to owning yet.)
* Herman Hesse - Steppenwolf. (Verily, it's true! I bought a general fiction book! Although really, after The Glass Bead Game I consider Hesse an honorary science fiction author. :) I picked this up because the way Hesse looks at life has appealed to me quite a bit in the past.)
* David Marusek - Counting Heads. (Another oddball choice; a giant (in width and height, not in thickness) trade paperback; the first novel of an author I've never heard of. But the cover features a Hancock Building amidst a cityscape which otherwise is completely anti-Chicago, and the coverblurb promises all kinds of things which to my mind seem very hard to pull off well, so it seemed like the perfect gamble. :) This also has quite a lot of total surveillance society touches, although the impact from them is likely to be decidedly less as it's set in the future nearly a century from now.)
* Jack McDevitt - A Talent for War, Seeker and Polaris. (I've picked up Seeker and Polaris so often, to always put them down again, that it was getting slightly ridiculous. Yet now they finally had the first book in this universe (written nearly twenty years ago) in stock, and so how could I not buy them? This should be space opera of the highest quality... *crosses fingers*)
* Patricia McKillip - Od Magic. (I still don't like these almost-but-not-quite trade-paperback sized McKillip volumes with their weirdly textured covers, but oh well, her writing is what it's all about in the end, and this one I hadn't read yet...)
* Marianne de Pierres - Dark Space. (She's Australia. That's really all the excuse I needed to pick up yet another unknown science fiction author. No idea whatsoever what to expect of this, so call it another gamble.)
* Robert M. Pirsig - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. (Another book not to be found in the science fiction section! I've been putting off buying this book for so long that I don't even really remember what got me interested in it in the first place. I do know that its popularity has played a major factor in not getting it before. Still, I think the time has come for me to read this.)
* Terry Pratchett - The Last Hero. (A paperback version of the coffee table book, in a square format preserving all the gorgeous illustrations, yet being small enough to fit on my shelves, for a trade paperback price. I remember reading the entire coffee table book in some random department store in Australia a couple of years ago. I'm glad to finally be able to own this now.)
* Terry Pratchett - Wintersmith. (The third Tiffany book; I've loved the first two, and I don't doubt the same will go for this one. No one writes more adult-friendly children's books than Pratchett, and they're always so wondrously tightly plotted. I bought this one in hardcover, as it followed Fragile Things with being on sale for less than the price of the paperback, and my Tiffany books already aren't all the same size anyway.)
* Adam Roberts - Stone and Polystom. (The universes from these books sound highly original and innovative. I've picked them up quite a few times before, but never really new where to start, so decided to just earmark him for Thanksgiving. Wonderfully abstract covers, too.)
* Justina Robson - Natural History and Keeping It Real. (I first noticed Keeping It Real earlier this month in Berlin, and immediately knew I had to pick it up this Thanksgiving. Magic, elves, elementals, demons - and AI, as all of the above joined the 'real world' back in 2015. That to me sounds like science fiction gone horribly right. :) To such a degree that it gave me enough confidence to also pick up Natural History, one of her earlier novels.)
* Geoff Ryman - Air. (This cover looks almost too slick, with the coverblurb too appealingly vague. The last village in the world to go online sounds like it almost has to lead to a botched job by someone who doesn't really understand the internet. And yet, and yet... He does have a quote by Greg Bear, and that gambling urge spoke up again...)
* Nick Sagan - Idlewild, Edenborn and Everfree. (Karin gave this trilogy an absolutely glowing review, and speaking with her she compared it to John C. Wright's Chronicles of Chaos trilogy - but then actually done right (and with a science fiction slant, rather than a fantasy one). I know just enough to listen when the bookbuyer of my favorite bookstore raves about books, and so getting this entire trilogy was a rather obvious decision.)
* John Scalzi - The Android's Dream and Old Man's War. (There is only one thing I can do to describe why I laughed out loud shortly after picking up this book, and then immediately put it in my basket, and that is to quote from the coverblurb I was reading: A human diplomat kills his alien counterpart. Earth is on the verge of war with a vastly superior alien race. A lone man races against time and a host of enemies to find the one object that can save our planet and our people from alien enslavement... a sheep. Yes, you read that right. I mean, honestly... how could I resist? Old Man's War was actually the book by this author that I picked up first, and decided to gamble on as it seemed like interesting space opera, but The Android's Dream means I now actually have high expectations of the author. Really looking forward to reading these. :))
* Karl Schroeder - Sun of Suns. (Last year I picked up his Lady of Mazes, which might just have been the most forgettable book I read in the entire year (I actually had to pick it up and look at several pages of it before I remembered what it was all about), and yet once I remembered some details about it, I did realize I had enjoyed it. Sun of Suns appears to contain a similarly originally crafted world, and although it has a blurb by Larry Niven (hint to publishers: that's less likely to make me want to read the book), it also has one by Vernor Vinge, and so I figured I'd go and see if this one would be less forgettable.)
* Charles Stross - The Atrocity Archives and The Jennifer Morgue. (Featuring a low-level techie working for a super-secret government agency as its unlikely hero, the entire setup is absolutely certain to appeal to geeks like me, especially knowing how well Stross groks geekdom.)
* Charles Stross - Halting State. (Talking about geekdom... This one's about a virtual bank-robbery, with the prime suspects being a band of marauding orcs with a dragon in tow for fire support. The entire setup is so much the pinacle of geek awesomeness that I decided Stross had proven himself enough with Accelerando (even though Glasshouse kinda sucked again) that it'd be worth buying in hardcover. Fingers crossed that that'll turn out to have been deserved.)
* Vernor Vinge - Across Realtime. (In discussions back when Vinge won the Hugo with Rainbows End, quite a few people mentioned how that wasn't nearly as good as his Realtime books, and so seeing this volume now, I picked it up. Looking at it and googling it a bit, it turns out to contain two books - The Peace War and Marooned in Realtime. Wish I'd seen that earlier, as I already own The Peace War (and didn't think it was Hugo material), and could've probably found the other cheap in a used bookstore somewhere, but oh well.)

*gulps* So yeah... 47 books, needing three stylish large green ABC bags to carry out. Kinda shattering last year's record. I'd better find myself some extra reading time somewhere or I'm going to have trouble finishing these all before next year's Thanksgiving. *g*
If you're interested in what I think of the books (especially the gambles), keep an eye on the What's everyone reading at the moment? thread.

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